Speech and Language Centre

The school runs a 22-place centre which caters for children who have EHCPs with a primary need of ‘Communication and Interaction,’ with regard to speech, language and communication difficulties.

Places are allocated by the Local Authority in consultation with the school. Children are based in the Speech and Language Centre classrooms (EYFS/KS1 and KS2) and receive specialist teaching and therapy from highly trained staff.

They also attend lessons in their ‘buddy’ mainstream classes, also joining their mainstream friends for break and lunchtimes.

During the Autumn term, Dolphins’ topic is ‘The Gingerbread Man.’ First, we made some gingerbread biscuits , but the gingerbread man ran away!

In Science, the children explored what would happen if the gingerbread man tried to swim in the river. They put a biscuit in water and observed what happened. It dissolved! We made warning posters to tell him not to swim!

In Maths, we have been learning to represent numbers in different ways. We explored lots of equipment and representations to make numbers to 5.

During the Autumn term, Orcas’ topic is ‘Twist and Shout!’  We are learning about different emotions and have written sentences and poems to describe them. We are linking this to our art work and computing.

In Music, we have continued to explore emotions, creating sounds which represent each feeling.

In English, we are ‘reading’ the wordless picture book ‘Clown’ by Quentin Blake and using a version of this as our model text.

In Science, we are learning about forces. The children have been carrying out experiments to explore friction.  They either used a toy car and a ramp to discover how far the car travelled on different surfaces, or a Newton metre to discover which shoe surfaces created the most friction. This helped them discover which was the best shoe to wear on snow and ice.

Alongside this, we have been having lots of fun in Maths learning about 2D and 3D shapes. We have been trying hard to use the correct mathematical language to describe the properties of shapes and have learnt about different types of angles including right angles, acute and obtuse angles. We also spent time hunting for different angles and shapes in our environment.