What’s at the bottom of the garden?
The HUB enjoyed a fruit and vegetable painting activity in the garden today! Prior to the creativity, we learnt all about how the different types of fruit and vegetable grow and what sufficiency they need to be able to grow effectively.
The children had an amazing afternoon in the sunshine!
In HUB 2 today, we have talked about the word BELONGING and the different ways we can feel that we belong. From this, we created our own unique maps, entitled THIS IS MY PLACE, which identify the places, groups, activities including our interests that provide us with a sense of belonging.
As you can see, our hobbies, interests, pets, families, friends alongside our special places ( school, home and favourite restaurants) all have a special place in our daily lives as they all make us feel that we belong.
This half-term, our theme in HUB1 is ‘Winter‘.
Today, the children enjoyed a water activity which represented the arctic – water with icebergs (that soon melted!) and animals that are found in the arctic!
Here, Niamh, Stanley, Isaac and Adam are loving the textures and imaginative play.
Firstly a big welcome back!
We hope you all had a lovely well rested Christmas break!
This week we have been settling back into school routine and structure and taking some time to get to know our lovely new pupils, making new friends and having lots of opportunities for free play and regulation!
In Math’s this week we did enjoy a lovely sensory activity, exploring shape and making patterns with flour! The children LOVE flour, the feel and texture and using it to mark make! Perfect for making patterns and shapes in, and it definitely looked a little bit like the snow falling outside! We explored squares, rectangles, triangles and circles and showed good understanding of some of these familiar shapes! Here’s a few snaps from one of our sensory lessons, lot’s of eye contact and engagement!
This afternoon the children in HUB 1 had a lovely afternoon exploring the great outdoors and getting crafty in the cabin! Our favourite kind of afternoon spent exploring our senses and regulating in the great outdoors!
We love anything that’s messy and involves paint, so Mrs. Buss’s idea to explore some bonfire themed colours and mix using sticks was just up our street! A great sensory session for encouraging again those fine motor skills and encouraging self expression and creativity! The children loved being outside in our very autumnal forest garden and explored the variety of leaves looking at colour, size and what happens as they fall to the ground! We had a special treat at the end of the day with some yummy hot chocolates and marshmallows, a great opportunity to sit together in our forest school circle and encourage some social and communication opportunities!
Here are some fab photos of the children highly engaged and involved in our forest afternoon…
As part of this morning activities we encouraged some independent mark making using a range of different materials to get those fingers moving! The children loved making this a sensory experience exploring the glitter and glue, even creating their own glittery gloopy firework sparkly mess! This activity allowed for some independent fine motor control and hand to eye coordination, whilst also encouraging some creative and emotional expression! The children loved spending a significant amount of time on this activity showing intense concentration and motivation! As you can see from the photos the children enjoyed this activity and stayed engaged for the full session!
A lovely calm start to our day with some stimulation and regulation through jigsaws! The boys were particularly engaged with these activities this morning and showed deep concentration and stayed with this activity for a prolonged period! They showed persisentence, determination, independence and support to one another as they accomplished their tasks and achievements of completed jigsaws!
Another great activity to keep those fingers and minds busy, promoting fine motor skills and turn taking with others! Sometimes it’s the simple activities which allow for the most learning opportunities…
This afternoon during our ‘curriculum time‘ the children explored Autumnal colours and manipulating paint with their hands and tools! We have been spending a lot of time in our outside cabin looking for signs of Autumn and the changes in the season, exploring the leaves and colours! Today we decided to paint our own Autumn tree, using the colours we had spotted from our nature expeditions!
The children loved creating trunks and branches with a brush, working on their fine motor skills and loved getting their fingers and hands messy for a sensory experience!
Here are a few snaps of some our HUB1 children taking part in our Attention Autism Barrell activity! The children enjoy this daily in our morning routine and have really improved in giving good eye contact and made huge progress with their listening and attention skills! The children wait in anticipation for the activities from the Barrell and the session promotes an abundance of opportunity for language and vocabulary development!
Below are some further snaps of our Math’s session looking at ‘more‘ and ‘less‘. We worked on counting out amounts visually and representing these amounts with the correct numeral. We looked at the terms ‘more’ or ‘less’ and the children enjoyed exploring more and less with conkers!
This afternoon in HUB1 we made our very own fairground chocolate apples, in celebration of Hull Fair week!
The children loved chocolate tasting and watching what happens to the chocolate when it heats in the microwave. We loved stirring the chocolate and exploring it’s texture once it had melted! The children had a go at independently dunking their apples and dipping in sprinkles to create the perfect yummy chocolate apples!
This was a great opportunity for engaging in a sensory activity, listening to the sounds of the microwave and sprinkles and smelling the scrumptious chocolate! It was also a great opportunity for language development and turn-taking, sharing and helping others!
We can’t wait to take them home tonight to have a go at tasting our delicious apples!
