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Class Teacher: Miss MacArtney
LSAs: Miss Brown, Miss McKelvey, Mr Abadaki and Ms Saxton
If you have any questions, then please don’t hesitate to ask one of The Oak team.
The Oak is an enhanced resourced class within Lark Hill Primary School which caters for KS2 children who experience Social, Emotional and Mental Health difficulties. It is based on the principles of Nurture Group philosophy. Nurture based classrooms address the social, emotional and learning needs of individual pupils by providing the necessary help to remove the barriers to learning. There is great emphasis on emotional literacy, language development and communication.
It is staffed by a full time teacher and learning support assistants.
The aim of the Oak is to provide children with a secure base within a mainstream school. The children learn from the National Curriculum but lessons are taught alongside a robust social and emotional curriculum so that the children develop behaviours for learning. Each child follows a personalised timetable and joins mainstream activities as part of an individualised approach.
All children in the class have a Educational Health Care Plan (EHCP). The curriculum is based on the National Curriculum and is differentiated according to each child’s stage of development.
Each child follows their own programme and their progress is closely monitored through observations and more formal assessments. Targets are shared and reinforced on a daily basis and achievement rewarded.
For children accessing the class full time, their transition to mainstream is carefully planned: children may join their peer group for chat and play, lunchtimes, playtime and enrichment time. As they progress the transition will build on their strengths, allowing them to join classes where they will experience success. Each stage will be monitored and taken at the child’s pace.
There is a strong focus on PSHE and emotional regulation throughout all activities.
As part of the curriculum in The Oak your child will also take part in activities in the sensory room and nurture sessions like cooking, outdoor learning, sensory play, Lego therapy and Smart moves (a fine and gross motor skills program).
At Lark Hill we have recently started working with a new literacy scheme - Ready, Steady, Write. This scheme focuses on immersing the children in quality texts and provides opportunities to write across a range of genres. In The Owls this term we will be working with The Rhythm of the Rain written by Grahame Baker Smith, a beautifully illustrated children's book that highlights the Earth's water cycle and our connection to the planet (a cross curricular text link with our science unit: Solids, Liquids, Gases and the water cycle). In The Sparrows the children will be working with The Secret of Black Rock by Joe Todd-Stanton. A story about a curious girl named Erin who defies local legends to discover the truth behind the fearsome "Black Rock," finding it's not a dangerous monster but a living, vibrant ecosystem, leading her to protect it from destructive fishermen and teach her community respect for the sea.
Individual, 1:1 reading with an adult and shared reading for pleasure will be part of our daily time table in The Oak. We would encourage all children to be reading with an adult at home. The National Literacy Trust provides us with research to show reading with children has astonishing benefits for them: comfort and reassurance, confidence and security, relaxation, happiness and fun. It builds self-esteem, vocabulary, feeds imagination and even improves their sleeping patterns.
The Maths curriculum is taught at different levels in our Owls and Sparrows rooms. This term in the Owls room we will be focusing on addition and subtraction including applying taught methods to word problems, negative numbers, using estimates and working with fractions. In the Sparrows we will be covering revision of addition and subtraction, recognising halves and quarters, sequencing days of the weeks and months of the year and recognising simple time durations.
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Our sound unit will look at how the ear drum sends signals to the brain. Key concepts include how sound is made (vibrations), how it travels (waves through mediums), and its properties (high/low pitch relates to vibration speed; loud/quiet volume relates to vibration strength/amplitude). When working with our Biology unit we will look at "the journey of food" (steps in digestion) and key organs and their functions when extracting nutrition for our bodies.
By the end of this unit children will have an understanding of the following: What was daily life like in ancient Egypt? How was The River Nile useful? How were the pyramids built? They will take part in a case study of a well-known pharaoh e.g. Tutankhamun or Cleopatra, will know the importance of Egyptian gods (Ra, Isis) and will be able to recognise some common hieroglyphs.
Our P.E lessons are on Wednesday and Friday. Children are welcome to attend school wearing their P.E kit on these days.
Don't forget to bring a water bottle to school each day - it is important for children to stay hydrated throughout the day. Please label bottles and refill them each day.
Children are welcome to bring a healthy snack such as fruit and vegetables to school each day for snack time. Breadsticks and milk can be purchased at the start of each half-term (please speak to the school office about this).
