It was another jam packed week; the staff team continued with their Apple Teacher Programme, this week focusing on the Pages app with a workshop led by our wonderful Mrs Taylor; our Digit4ll Pathway pupils worked hard researching and preparing news stories ready to produce their BBC News Report (click here for details); and on Thursday the whole school had great fun celebrating World Book Day with dressing up and collaborative story writing. We even paused to “drop everything and read,” as you’ll read about yourself later in this week’s blog.

On Wednesday however, it was a particularly special day as we welcomed into school a team of local school leaders from across the Trust to carry out a Peer to Peer review. We believe that our curriculum at New Bridge School is outstanding; it is the result of continuing innovation and development to ensure it is fit for purpose because it meets the needs of the young people who come through our doors. However, that’s just what we think, so to check out whether other experienced school leaders thought the same, we had invited them to spend a morning in school to judge for themselves.

The day was incredibly positive. In teams we toured the school, the Learning Centre and our Medtia Square site, dropping into classes, observing what we could see, hear and feel, talking to pupils, students and staff and generally looking for evidence that might support our claims to an outstanding curriculum or help us develop it further. In the afternoon we brought together and shared our findings. What was clear was that across the school we had witnessed a calm, purposeful learning environment, nurturing supportive relationships between pupils and staff and personalised learning opportunities for individual children all set within a context of preparing our pupils for life beyond school. It made me extremely proud to be part of our New Bridge team and I’m really looking forward to reading the formal report we’re due to receive soon. I’ll be sure to share details from it in a future blog.

This week we take a closer look at our Autism Base classes starting with AB2..

We have been having a wonderful time singing with Mr Thompson in Music and using the soundbeam – watch out Stars in your Eyes!

We have been studying the Chinese New Year and really enjoyed making pig biscuits for the Year of the Pig..

We have also been matching sentences related to the story about how the animals came to be picked in their order..

We have been using the interactive whiteboard to sort items into big and little in Maths..

..and to complete our pancake orders..

We have been exploring Tandle Hill and Alexandra Park in our outdoor ed. sessions, making the most of the lovely early Spring sunshine..

In History we have been studying the Victorians and we treated ourselves to a proper old fashioned afternoon tea fit for the Queen. We made cucumber sandwiches for our friends from AB1..

After our tea we enjoyed dressing up and looking at the different Victorian artefacts that Mr Hanif gave us..

Spring is also round the corner in AB1, where we have been busy painting daffodils for St David’s Day..

..and flipping pancakes on Shrove Tuesday..

We even managed to make lions with our pancakes!!

In AB3 our topic this term has been ‘The Twits.’ We have been reading the story and this week we have been looking at Mr Twit’s beard. We selected some of the food items described in the story to stick on to Mr Twit’s beard to create a descriptive collage..

We have also completed question activities following reading the story using our communication symbols and we worked hard on our fine motor skills, carefully completing an overwriting piece about Mr Twit’s beard..

In Maths we have completed different counting activities, including identifying how many of the Muggle-Wump monkeys were locked in Mr and Mrs Twit’s cage..

..and searching for hiding Muggle-Wump monkeys in the soft play area then sorting them in to ‘big and small’ monkeys..

In World Studies we have continued our work on ‘The Victorians’ and this week we looked at the different jobs that Victorian children had. We watched a video on the interactive screen and then completed an overwriting activity and matched the pictures to identify the correct job role..

Everyone has been working really hard and Mrs McLaughlin, Miss Kinder, Miss Raeburn and Miss Ogden are really impressed with the fantastic effort that the whole class have demonstrated since coming back after the half term. Well done AB3!

The whole school got involved in World Book Day on Thursday, with everyone invited to dress up as their favourite character from a book for the day. As you can imagine, there were all kinds of wonderful costumes – here are just some of our pupils..

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..and staff..

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We synchronised watches and all took part in our ‘Drop everything and Read!’ event at 11.10am, whatever lesson we were in at the time..

Year 7 enjoyed joining in a ‘live draw-along’ with illustrator Chris Riddle..

Mrs Holland would like to say a special thank you to Christian, Jake and Natalia for coming forward to organise the whole school story ‘Superman’s Dilemma’ and visiting every class to read out the starter (they did brilliantly!). Our story will be completed and typed up next week, we are looking forward to reading it!

Miss Silvester’s class made their own costumes and turned their classroom straight into a scene from 101 Dalmations..

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Mrs Holland’s Pathways English group have been reading ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and used their lesson to write messages from Bruno to Shmuel before sending them as paper aeroplanes..

They also created a display using images and quotes from the text..

We are very grateful to both Rose Knipe, the Community Champion from Tesco Failsworth, for her generous donation of books for our event..

..and to Gail Cotterill from Morrisons Failsworth for her kind donation of books..

It is wonderful to receive support like this from our local community and we really appreciate it – as you have seen, the books are already proving very popular!

Gavin

You can find Dawn’s blog for the Learning Centre here

For news on our Key Stage 5 pathway groups at Medtia Square please click here

Click here to read this week’s news from Graham

You can find my previous blog posts here