News, STARS and Intensive Interaction from John & the PHS Team! Friday 18th October 2024

Hi everyone,

Happy Friday on this sunny autumn day! It’s nice that it’s still relatively warm and light, before the clocks go back. Autumn is a lovely time on school, as you can see from the Early Years Group and some Outdoor Learning activities! It’s a lovely time before the rush towards Christmas and the end of the year too, after half term. It’s been a long half and there’s another week to go though!

Please do have a look at Eileen’s blog which I know many of you enjoy, and Joel has put together some very good stuff this week about Online Safety too, so there’s always lots to read from us, or to peruse on the school and company websites as well if you’re a big reader!

Otherwise, there are a wide variety of articles to read this week, and some really interesting things: Intensive Interaction, Turn on the Subtitles, the Wellbeing Connect project, Resilience Day, safeguarding stuff – but also the lovely usual highlights of stars, Makaton and the like too

Thanks for your continued support and all the best. Cheers!

John S

😊 from John & the PHS Team 😊

We have 3 Super-Steering Groups which deliver our Key Drivers through our curriculum. The Key Drivers are Communication, Wellbeing and Independence. The Groups are Literacy, Physical Development and Personal Development

Literacy

Becky, our Literacy Lead, leads a team that improve all aspects of literacy, including this year a lot of handwriting and oracy (it’s OK, she’ll be going into explain all of that) as well as reading, phonics, books and all sorts!

This week we have Sarah with Turning on the Subtitles!

Here at Percy Hedley School, we are always exploring strategies and ideas to support our students to further develop their literacy skills.  ‘Turn On The Subtitles’ (TOTS) is a worldwide initiative which is quickly becoming the largest worldwide literacy campaign. The aim of the initiative is to change the way children and young people engage with television by combing screen time with reading time and as a result increase language acquisition and develop reading skills.

There are some familiar faces from the world of TV that are supporters of the campaign including Lenny Henry, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Stephen Fry.

In 2024 the initiative has introduced a new service for television broadcasters ‘Caterpillar Captions’

The blue caterpillar logo indicates that the channels and streaming services and shows that will captions in a specific font and arrangement of text on a screen for younger viewers.  If you would like further information about the TOTS initiative, please click on the link

Physical Development

Everything that is fabulous in the world of Physical Development! This includes physio, hydro, MOVE, PE, HI, VI, a lot of OT and all sorts of key areas for us, including all of the Outdoor Learning, John Muir Award and many other aspects. Steph oversees this and will ensure that an aspect is shared in the blog each week

This week, Abi has been working with Jackson working hard in MOVE developing his leg strength to bounce his way into the weekend

Well done, Jackson! Bouncing Star!

Personal Development

One of the best things about the school and one of the most important for our pupils, PD covers PSHE, Wellbeing, Careers, Social Moral Spiritual & Cultural, Online Safety, Behaviour and similar areas. Jo pulls it all together. Let’s see what Jo and the team have in store for us this week – quite a lot as usual I think!

The team have done a lot of work on Mental Health Day, Black History Month and poverty

Some more world mental health day work from 4AJ:

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

4KR have learned about International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, which is acknowledged on the 17th October. The students looked at the UN website to remember the logo and discussed how poverty can affect people in everyday life across the globe. As a class they explored the website called Values Money and Me where they played a game about managing a shopping budget and making sensible choices with spending

Wellbeing!

Here’s Andy! We heard about the whole team last week, which was great, and how this Connect project is continuing. Let’s get the latest

Hello everyone!

Continuing our wellbeing theme of “Connect” this week’s challenge focused on helping others. We invited you to think of ways to lend a hand, whether through a small act of kindness or a big gesture. We can’t wait to hear what you’ve been up to!

A HUGE shoutout to Kayden D for volunteering in outdoor learning! He helped extinguish the fire and tidy up, Hannah said, “It was such a thoughtful gesture. I thanked him with one of the yummy spam sandwiches we’d made on the fire!”

Ellie B in 4RR has also gone above and beyond to support her friends this week, showing empathy and kindness when they were feeling down. This is the kind of help we love to see—well done, Ellie!

We hope you all enjoyed making a difference this week!

Next week, our challenge is about connecting with yourself. We encourage you to “Try something new.” This could be sampling new foods at lunchtime, sitting in a different spot/with a different person, or joining a new club.

Don’t forget to share your photos and stories with Andy at a.dawson@percyhedley.org.uk. Let’s keep connecting!

Feel free to send any photos or comments to Andy at a.dawson@percyhedley.org.uk Let’s keep the fun going!

Behaviour for Learning (BfL)

Behaviour for Learning (BfL) is a new team, overlapping sometimes with Safeguarding and Mental Health. BfL is an approach to understanding and developing children’s behaviour that focuses on their relationship with their self, others and the curriculum, and promotes readiness for education. The BfL team support staff and pupils. The BfL approach is consistent with our values and compatible with systems such as PBS and NAPPI

Resilience Day

Nat mentioned Resilience Day here last week – it’s a great thing for us to be doing. Let’s hear from Nat now

On the 10^th October, we supported the charity ‘Young Minds’ on their Hello Yellow Day on our usual collapsible day as part of our Resilience Framework. In order to promote a healthy output for negative emotions we made a collaborate piece of art where students were encouraged to get creative and release their ‘negative thoughts’ by splattering paint on a blank canvas. The students certainly weren’t afraid to get messy and the majority had a go and produced a lovely design (full reveal pending). Alongside this project the student had access to other activities including Mindful colouring, Pilates, movies and other relaxing activities designed to be relaxing or fun.

Take a look at some of the photos that were taken on the day! (It took a little while to clean up after! 😆)

Intensive Interaction with Beth!

Happy Intensive Interaction Week!  

Intensive Interaction Week is an annual week when people from around the world collectively do something ‘a bit extra’ to promote the Intensive Interaction approach and its life-enriching qualities

What is Intensive Interaction? 

Intensive Interaction is an approach designed to help people who, regardless of cognitive or physical ability, have some sort of social communication impairment. For example, they may not use or understand speech, they might behave passively and wait for things to happen rather than initiate, or they may be very active and make it difficult for people to know how to engage and interact with them. They may have difficulty in social situations, for example struggling with eye contact or taking turns, or they may struggle being with people. Intensive Interaction helps develop communication skills and build better relationships with people. It helps our young people to connect with the adults around them. There are a range of strategies which we use within Intensive Interaction but essentially it is about joining a pupil in THEIR world, speaking THEIR language (verbally or non-verbally), at THEIR pace. The pupil initiates and we follow their lead in whatever language and communication the pupil uses

Intensive Interaction has many outcomes, here are a few:

 Social Communication Outcomes

• Enjoying being with another person 
• Developing the ability to attend to that person 
• Concentration and attention span 
• Learning to do sequences of activity with a person 
• Taking turns in exchanges of behaviour  
• Sharing personal space 
• Learning to regulate and control arousal levels 
• Using and understanding eye contacts 
• Using and understanding facial expressions 
• Using and understanding other non-verbal communications 
• Using and understanding physical contacts 
• Vocalising and using vocalisations meaningfully (including speech)

Psychological and Emotional Outcomes

• Knowing that others care, learning to care 
• Enjoying being with another person – connecting, bonding, etc. 
• Attachment, attunement 
• Self-security, to feel safe, secure, calm 
• Self-esteem, sense of self 
• To identify own feelings and see the same in others 
• Gradually to understand feelings  
• Trust 
• Empathy, knowing/caring about how somebody else feels 
• Right hemisphere brain development

How have we celebrated this week? 

• In school this week some of our classes have given pupils more sessions than normal dedicated to focus solely on Intensive Interaction
• We have daily posts about Intensive Interaction on our Facebook page so please read, like and share them
• We captured photos of some lovely communicative moments around school of staff demonstrating a responsive environment. We also took photos from Intensive Interaction sessions which hopefully help show what Intensive Interaction is!
• Just over 30 Learning Support Assistants from across all departments and our Admin Team (see our group photo!) also completed their final teaching week of a Responsive Environment module. The purpose of this module was to learn about the importance of being attuned to our pupils, how we can be more responsive and an introduction to Intensive Interaction. The course was delivered by Beth Edwards (Teacher) and Rachel Jiggins (Speech and Language Therapist) who are currently training to become Intensive Interaction Trainers for the Percy Hedley Foundation. Next half term LSAs will continue learning by reflecting on examples of good practice and learning more by reading the latest research

You can find out more by clicking the button below, or feel free to email Beth or Rachel – e.edwards@percyhedley.org.uk or rachel.jiggins@percyhedley.org.uk who would love to chat!

 Welcome to Early Years!

Here’s Kerry with what’s been happening recently with our youngest pupils

Once again this week our focus has been Autumm

In our outdoor learning session we explored the outdoor learning area for coloured items to match to our colour board. We have explored fruits and vegetables in our exploration area. We are all enjoying our focus story about Mr Maize the scarecrow, using our senses to explorer. The weather was a little colder this week, so our cold weather box has been out most days. The children explored the ice, trying to melt it with the pipettes, budding scientists in the making.   We have also had our everyday soft play and Rebound visit along with outdoor play

This week we have started our artist of the week, each week a piece of Artwork will be chosen and take pride of place on the wall in our creative area. This week’s artist is Aimee! Aimee made this lovely picture by dabbing different colours on to her hand then printing it on to the paper

Amazing, Aimee!

Well done!

Therapy Star of the Week! Love Therapy Star of the Week, especially when it’s Jackson and Jay!

Jay and Jackson celebrated World Food Day on Wednesday. They had lots of fun in the sensory cooking session- Jackson made a delicious dessert for his lunchtime

…..from John & the Team here at PHS

Our Key Drivers:

Communication, Wellbeing, Independence