News, Stars & Artists from John & the PHS Team Friday 8th December 2023

A huge thankyou to SOS Group Ltd who have again donated the Christmas tree for our library area.  Students from across the school have taken turns to add decorations to the tree to make it look fantastic.  Here is a photo of the tree with Sadie adding the finishing touches!

Friday 8^th December

Hi everyone

Well, it’s properly December now, and it’s really feeling like that Christmassy vibe is starting to rear up! Some nice things are happening already. But there are also all the usual things too, so please do look at Artist of the Week, and a few other therapy sessions and lessons that have happened in the past few days

There’s good stuff from the three Super Steering Groups, from safeguarding, and great Stars of the week, Makaton and some calendar dates too. From next week it’s the last two weeks and the events start to happen, so please do look at the calendar online or at the bottom of the blog. We really hope to see some of you at those if you can possibly make it

All the very best for a great weekend and much Christmas spirit to you wherever you are!

J

😊 from John & the PHS Team 😊

Literacy

Personal Development

Physical Development

• our three Super Steering Groups

These three big Steering Groups deliver our curriculum – there’s a paper describing how it all works on the website if you want to read further. The Groups work on all the areas in these broad themes to deliver the right things for our pupils. This is where a lot of exciting stuff is happening, so I can’t resist leading on it in the blogs. Here is the latest from those three Groups

Literacy!

With The Literacy Squad! All Things Literacy! Here’s Sarah!

Our literacy team are once again hard at work planning a festive treat for our students – ‘Jolabokaflod’ is returning, but on a slightly smaller scale! For those of you who are new to the school or missed this last year, ‘Jolabokaflod’  translates as ‘Christmas book flood’ and is an Icelandic Christmas tradition. Books are gifted to friends and family on Christmas Eve, then opened immediately and enjoyed together curled up by the fire with a hot drink!

As part of our ‘Year of Reading’ last year, students were gifted a book to enjoy in class and then take home, whereas this year we will focus more on the experience within school. We are planning a special afternoon of cozy book sharing in our classrooms, once again funded by The Friends of Percy Hedley School. Last year we had fireplace scenes on the class whiteboards, twinkly lights and lots of festive story fun, which we can’t wait to replicate for our students again.

If anyone is interested in finding out more about Jolabokaflod it’s worth a little read here: https://jolabokaflod.org/about/founding-story/

As always, if your pupil has a favourite festive book that they would like to bring in and share with their class please do send it in and let the team know!

The Literacy Squad

Personal Development

Jo oversees this rich and crucial area, full of aspects lie wellbeing, careers, PSHE, Citizenship and other great things It’s a strength of our school. Some in-depth stuff this week about another of the areas in PD. Nice one Jo!

SMSC, British Values & Citizenship

6LA have enjoyed looking at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pupils looked at a range of articles that make up this declaration and ranked them by what they feel is most important to them. The class also completed a wordsearch to help highlight the key vocabulary linked to Human Rights

(Laurie did send some lovely photos but they haven’t downloaded correctly unfortunately!)

Wellbeing

4AJ have been working on strategies to support their own wellbeing, using the Resilience Framework to support.

Shaye has been keeping a positivity diary!

Physical Development

Steph oversees the Physical Development team’s exciting work. Have a look today at what Sam’s done for us about wheelchair driving! Skills and lessons! Let’s hear from Sam first, about this crucial area of Physical Development that has a real impact on some of our pupils’ lives

Each Tuesday morning the gym area, becomes “Powered Wheelchair Driving Skills Development Sessions” time. These sessions are run jointly by an Occupational Therapist and a team of Therapy assistants, to support students who have their own powered wheelchair.

Every student at Percy Hedley School is individual and everyone’s physical and cognitive skills and abilities vary. Some students get into their powered wheelchair and master skills quickly, whilst other students require time, extensive support, and training to support them to make small steps.

The Percy Hedley School Driving Programme is tailored to address a variety of needs. It consists of pre-driving skills followed by 8 defined Levels. These progress in terms of difficulty and competence.

For students with impaired mobility, the development of powered wheelchair driving skills and the mobility this provides, is further supported through a team approach and daily opportunities within the school setting to develop access and graded functional driving skills. 

Welcome to Powered Wheelchair Driving Skills – Development Sessions!

Students in Level 5 skills group have been working on functional reversing and hazard awareness!

This term, the students in the pre-driving skills group have been busy have fun developing cause/ effect skills linked to movement

AND NOW A NEW THING! AND IT’S A GOOD ONE!

Yes! PHS Artist of the Week!

Our new Art teacher, Kasia, has made a real difference and impression since she started in September. The room looks great and a lot of pupils tell me they enjoy art! Kasia has made an Artist of the Week – and the first winner is a very well-deserving one – Shannon! This is from Kasia

Our Artist of this week is Shannon from 6LWC. Shannon is currently working towards the Bronze Art Award. This week Shannon has been working on their Abstract Painting skills scraping techniques using a palette knife and brush to layer Acrylic paint

We were especially impressed with this painting as it only took an hour to complete and Shannon was so focused and engaged in this activity.

Very Well done!

And let’s see Shannon’s great piece of work – I think it’s brilliant!

Therapy of the Week!

Eva and Kathryn are two of our senior Speech & Language Therapists. Here’s Eva talking about some of the important work her and her team do.

On Wednesday mornings some of our VOCA users meet up with VOCA mentors from Hedley’s Horizons.  Emma is one of the mentors and has recently completed her qualification.  Our students are really enjoying meeting up with an experienced VOCA user, learning new skills and most importantly having a good chat!

Lesson of the Week – from Lauren and the gang

Each week in social communication we work with Julie to sing songs about visiting the shops, and the things we can buy there. Today, Julie created a shop in our class so we put our shopping skills into action! We visited ‘Gracey’s Groceries’, ‘Amelia’s Amenities’ and ‘Benjamin’s Bargains’ and each student thoroughly enjoyed either being the shop keeper or the customer. The students used a range of communication skills to ask for items in the shop, and to serve their customers. It was a big hit with everyone and we were very proud of how well the students worked together. Well done everyone!

Events Calendar

The link to the calendar is here https://www.percyhedley.org.uk/percy-hedley-school/parent-and-carers/ – we very much want to be giving you as much advance notice as possible of all the things that are happening

Rebecca sent out a letter detailing the events that are happening in the Appropriate Accreditation Pathway too recently, so I’ve reprinted it here too

Below is the calendar for the last few weeks of term

12th and 13th December – Moving in a Winter Wonderland (students only event)

14th December – Christingle at St Johns Church (student event only)

18th December – Express your Elf! – Upper School talent show (student event only)

19th December – Christmas Lunch (student event only)

20th December – Christmas Enterprise Fair from 2pm – Open to all parents with students KS3 and up.

21st December – Christmas Jumper Day/ School finishes for students.

22nd December – Staff training day

And Sarah did too!

You are invited to this half term’s ELTBA pathway Christmas coffee, catch-up and crafts afternoon on Friday 15th December 2- 3pm, which will take place in the school dining room. As part of the afternoon, you will have the opportunity to meet members of the class team, other parents, and carers, as well as making Christmas crafts with your child. We look forward to seeing you on Friday 15th December

Here are other dates of end of term/festive events that are taking place within the ELTBA pathway:

12th & 13th December-MOVE-ing in a Winter Wonderland (student event only)

14th December-Christingles, St John’s Church, Killingworth, (student event only)

14th December-True Colours Party-Lower School am (student event only)

15th December-ELTBA pathway Christmas Crafts and Coffee & Catch-up afternoon 2-3pm (parents & carers welcome to attend).

19th December-Christmas Dinner & Jolabokaflod (see school Blog for further information) (student event only)

20th December-Christmas Enterprise Fair 2-3pm (Open to all parents with KS3 students)

21st December-Percy Hedley School Christmas Jumper Day / School finishes for students.

22nd December-Staff training day. I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a “This term we have rolled out pure Forest School to the whole of lower school. Forest School is different to Outdoor learning as there is no direct link to the curriculum and is based around free exploration. This doesn’t mean that the children don’t learn anything, far from it. We focus on the School Values “Teamwork” “Respect” & “Resilience” as well as the Key Drivers “Communication” “Independence” and “Wellbeing”.

And finally….Forest School Outdoor Learning Stuff which we love! Here’s Hannah! In the snow!

The sessions are child-led, and the children are thoroughly enjoying taking learning into their own hands. This half term already we have looked at how we can work as a team to build a bridge over the huge puddle that appears after every heavy rain fall, we have improved in confidence at crossing such a wobbly bridge, we have built boats and looked at floating and sinking and we have looked at what will make the biggest splash in the puddles (and this was all in the space of a 30minute session!)

It has been lovely to see the students grow with confidence throughout these sessions, they are learning how to make choices and how to persevere when things aren’t going the way they want, and they are achieving things they never thought they could

In time, I hope that each session will have a theme, with activities based around these theme (this could be different Calendar celebrations, or simply something like “woodland creatures”), but at the moment we are just getting used the Forest School ethos

Here are some photos of 3HB having fun in the snow, taking turns and using a range of problem-solving techniques to work out what makes the best sledge and unleashing their creative side with a snowman building competition

Outdoor Learning! In the snow! Fabulous!

All the very best to all of you at home, from all of us here at the school. Happy December and all the things that go with it!

…..from John & the Team here at PHS