Hi Bumblebee families 👋

We hope you had a restful bank holiday😊

This week we have been bear explorers 🐻🧭. In our sensory story session we are continuing to explore ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt!’, in which we are becoming more familiar with the story each week.

This week’s bucket time included exploring each step of the story and seeing if we could identify the key phrase ‘we’ve got to go… through it!’ by vocalising or pressing a sound button🥾. In stage 3, each child took turns to spray the brown paint to decorate the bear picture, working as a group and developing our observation and turn taking skills🤝

At the tables for our ‘work’ time, some of us explored a sensory tuff tray. Others began completing colourful semantics to express our understand of the story using familiar pages and answering ‘who?’, ‘what doing?’ and ‘where?’. Other children were using simple images linked to elements of the bear hunt story answering ‘who?’ and ‘where? 🤔❓

During our creative session, we mapped out a river, just like the first setting in the bear hunt story. We used our developing fine motor skills to sculpt a winding river using glue and building off of the paper with various blue shade materials 🏞️

All children showed great independence in completing the activity with little prompting needed from us adults 💙

In cooking this week, we have practiced our pouring skills to create our very own squash! The Bumblebees’ team are very impressed at our bee’s hard efforts to pour with accuracy which they have been developing in various activities across the year 🥰🥛

Our favourite was the orange squash and as you can see, lots of the children had a taste afterwards! 👅

We also created our own healthy fruit salad!🍒🍊🍇🍑🍌🍏
Using a blunt plastic knife, we held with a tight grasp and cut straight down to create slices of each fruit. We then added this into a bowl, following the visual instructions. We then made a choice between 3 symbols to choose which sauce we wanted to top it off. Each child made their own choice by tapping with an isolated finger and then squeezing the bottle with independence 🥗

As always, we are continuing to thrive in our communication skills; some of us have recently moved on to using more complex, stage 2 ALD’s!🗣️

Some of us are confidently able to tap a single PECS symbol or swipe across an ALD. Some of us are beginning to use an ALD more confidently by adding elements of ‘more’ and ‘finished’. Some of us are even pressing two symbols to connect words and navigate a request, WOW!🤩🥳

As you can see this week, a firm favourite was the balloon pump activity 🎈

A big thank you to our wonderful Bumblebee’s teaching assistant, Lisa❤️

Lisa is not only our life saver who keeps us safe each week with her watchful eye at the side of the pool, but she has also provided us with some wonderful pool resources that as you can see are greatly appreciated🥰

We hope that all the other classes enjoy these resources too when swimming over at Walsall Wood!🏊🤿

See you next week everyone!😊

The Bumblebee team🐝❤️

Hi Bumblebee families 👋

This week we have engaged in lots of sensory fun! Our week started with sensory train. We love exploring all the lands, but particularly bubble land and material land 🫧

All of Bumblebees are great at understanding what to do when they see the chairs in our train formation, and even love to look at the ALDs to express their enjoyment at each stop! 🚂

We have also enjoyed some water play with the hot weather 💦🫧🌊💧

It is so lovely to see our sensory learners demonstrate their brilliant play skills of parallel play and shared attention around the water table. We joined in with lots of tipping and pouring, splashing, clapping and blowing to make the foamy bubbles fly 🤩

We continued to make the most of the weather out on the sunny playground! We have played with friends, relaxed on the grass and even took our favourite story books to read under the tree📖🌳👬🌞🕶️

We have enjoyed another exciting music looking at tempo with Bev. We have used the chimes to tap and bang to a fast and slow beat using fast and slow symbols. We have also enjoyed making a choice between the fast and slow symbols to decide how our music will sound 🎶🎼🎵

In cooking we made, tried and tested our very own jam sandwiches 🥪. We are gaining lots of independence by following the visual instructions and some of us are even beginning to order the steps to sequence our cooking with the support of an adult 🧑‍🍳

Yet another lovely, sunny week in Bumblebees ☀️❤️

The Bumblebee team🐝

Hello Bumblebee families 👋

We are loving exploring our current sensory story, ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt!’, this week.

We are particularly looking at key elements such as settings, characters and other focus items such as welly boots to ‘squelch, squerch’ through the mud! The children explored two new settings this week; the snowstorm and the forest ❄️🌳

The children are showing their understanding through matching the symbol to the setting image, and copying and following lots of adult signing to resemble each familiar setting.

As you can see we are doing so well at following the adult lead on the carpet, and then moving off to sit and work at a table as a group!⭐️

We have also had lots of fun this week using these skills of sitting and attending to a work activity through our cooking. The children made a healthy salad this week; practicing their cutting skills 1:1 with an adult, and then forming the salad by following the visual instructions and choosing which dressing they would like 🥗

We are expanding our communication not only through visual instructions in cooking, but through our communication session too.

Look at how well we have done this week at demonstrating our ability to use an ALD to communicate a request and our attention and engagement to sit around the carpet and engage with familiar routines such as bucket time 🗣️

In our problem solving, we have continued to work on big and small. In bucket time we used a balloon with some lemonade and bicarbonate to make a reaction and watch the balloon expand to get ‘bigger, bigger, BIG!’ 🎈🤩

Some of us even took part in a quiz to demonstrate our growing knowledge of measure. Others built towers to make a big tower, then knock it over – now it’s small 👷‍♀️👷‍♂️

We are so pleased that we were able to swim again this week. We have had so much fun in the pool and the children show great confidence in self-care routines before and after with dressing and undressing, and entering and exiting the pool 🏊‍♀️🏊🏊‍♂️

Have a lovely weekend ❤️

The Bumblebee team🐝

Hi Bumblebee families 👋

This week we have continued with some brilliant work on our new curriculum areas 😊

On Monday, we followed on ‘space, shape and measure’, by continuing to explore the big and small items. Within our bucket time session, we created our OWN foam splat choosing between ‘big’ and ‘small’ symbols to decide it’s size. Some children could then move to independent activities, and relay their knowledge from the previous session by immediately exploring the items with more independence 📊

This week, we extended our understanding by identifying and creating our own big and small towers. Some of us sorted the big and small items on to a big and small sheet 🧱

Unfortunately this week, swimming was cancelled.
We still had lots of fun however, getting on the bus and following our usual routine to Walsall Wood. We then used the soft play and showed off our great gross motor skills 🛝

In cooking, we have begun following simple, visual instructions with the support of an adult. This week we used the instructions with key vocabulary such as pour, scoop, tip to create a chocolate milk!🥛 We also had some practice of our cutting skill focus in 1:1 cutting fruit. Some children liked to try the apple and some orange too 🍎🍊🍋🍌

In Thursday creative session, we loved engaging in ‘bear hunt’ activities 🐻. We decorated our own bears and worked on our fine motor skills in an independent play-dough tuff tray, modelled within Attention Autism 🎨🖌️

In our PE this term, our topic is ‘games’. For Summer 1, we are looking at ball skills. We have started with rolling a ball, and using it to aim for a target. The children enjoyed rolling the ball to knock over the cones, just like bowling! ⚽️🎾🏐 🎳

We hope you have a lovely weekend✨

The Bumblebee team🐝

Hi Bumblebee families 👋

It’s our final term in Bumblebees and we have so much fun planned. This week we have got stuck straight in with lots of amazing work.

On Monday, we started our new ‘space, shape and measure’ topic. We have begun with ‘big and small’. Within our bucket time session, we explored big and small through a small foam splat and a big foam splat. We then painted big and small circles 🖌️.
We then explored and sorted big and small items in the tuff trays 🎈

On Tuesday afternoons we are back to swimming 🏊‍♀️.

The children have gained lots of confidence in the pool, and love playing with all the equipment to fill, pour, and tip the water 🐳

Back in class we have been exploring everything related to our new topic, ‘Down in the Jungle’. Our first animal we are focusing on is a BEAR🐻. We will be engaging with the story ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt!’ 📖

Here is a link if you’d like to listen with your child…

In class, we listened to the story and then focused on the first three settings. The grass, the river and the mud 🌳🌊🧱

The children explored each setting and then matched the symbol to the image of the setting.

On Wednesday and Thursday we had lots of celebrations for Eid 🌙☪️

On Wednesday, we mixed together the ingredients to make a Chapati as well as rolling this to make a circular Chapati shape in some flour. We also practiced our cutting skills with some fruits 🧑‍🍳

In Thursday’s bucket time, we made glitter moon and stars; our Eid symbols 🌙🌟✨⭐️

We then decorated our very own glitter moon and stars, as well as collaging some Eid lanterns, and making some lunar moon hanging decorations 🎨🖼️

We have also enjoyed mark making for our sound of the week, letter ‘m’ this week. The children have shown great progress from Monday – Friday in their ability to mark make with more independence ✏️

Have a restful weekend bees 🐝

See you next week!
The Bumblebees team 🐝

Hi Bumblebee families!👋

What a week we have had!😊 This week, our children have had so many special moments. We have had lots of vocalisations, lots of breakthroughs and they are all absolutely thriving with our structured daily routines in Bumblebees.

In our Monday problem solving session, the children have worked so hard in a variety of ways. As part of our workstation tasks, we have worked on missing number lines, to ordering numbers, colour sorting and puzzle matching! 🧩

As part of our small group table activities, we completed numicon printing. The children made a choice of numicon, dipped it into their choice of paint, and then printed this onto paper. We then counted how many holes their were to recognise which numicon was printed 🧮

On Tuesday, we travelled over to our Walsall Wood site 🚌. Unfortunately, we could not swim this week. Instead, we utilised the ‘rainbow room’ soft play equipment, and the multi-sensory room✨

On Wednesday, we have a cooking session 👩‍🍳. The children have loved getting used to some new cooking equipment the past few weeks. This week we used this equipment, such as a wooden spoon to stir with, creating polar bear biscuits 🍪

The children also had the choice of access to our dough station, using a rolling pin to ‘roll’, cutters and a wooden knife to ‘cut’. This is something that we often have out during a cooking session to get the children used to the motions of ‘making’. Some of our children even tried on the chefs hat 👨‍🍳.

On Thursday, we like getting creative in Bumblebees 👩‍🎨. Our session this week included polar bear pictures! The children were given the option to use collaging materials to pick the feel of their polar bear, but lots of our children opted for simple pens, crayons and stampers instead 🤩. It was so nice to see all of our children volunteering themselves to join in with an activity altogether; every single child had a great go at this around the table as a group 🤍

As a 1:1 activity, the children also completed a ‘Bouncy Ball Painting’ following our Attention Autism stage 3! Each child got the opportunity to come and pick a bouncy ball, dip this in a choice of paint colours, and then drop this into the tray and roll it around to make marks 🖌️🤹

On Friday, we got up to lots of our usual fun! Parachute time, and using our communication aids to make a request during snack time. However, we also got to celebrate our lovely TA’s birthday – happy birthday Amanda!🎈🥳🎂

See you all next week!

The Bumblebees team🐝

Hello Bumblebee families 👋

We are so excited to have had another great week with all of our Bumblebees🐝

We LOVE exploring our topic ‘Penguins and Polar Bears’ 🐧🐻‍❄️

This week we have continued on ‘The Snow is On My Head’ as well as ‘That’s Not My Polar Bear’ 🧊

In our creative sessions, we have explored lots of snow like textures using conditioner and cornflour to make a fake snow mixture, as well as some white died sand to create snowballs!🤲

We have also explored a big COLD iceberg!🥶 The children enjoyed spraying this down with various different coloured water to watch it melt away into individual ice cubes.

We have also completed some great iceberg mark making with great decision making about which tool to mark with 🎨

Some children chose pens, others chose chalks, but the favourite was stampers! ✏️

We are also continuing to progress with our skills of joining in during ‘Stage 3’ of ‘Bucket Time’ 🪣.

The children this week have had a go at sitting under a clear umbrella and watching the rain fall as we sing ‘The rain is on our heads’, just like our story song!💦

They were also super at driving through the snow, where each child made a request for a particular coloured car, and then drove this through a shaving foam and paint mixture to mimic ‘driving through the snow’. 🚗🚙❄️ This was then moved over to the table as a supervised group provision, because the children loved it so much!

We have also had some of our usual fun with ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’ sounds in Bev’s music session 🎶📣🤫… and some outdoor learning with chalk, writing our phonetic sounds out and getting moving on our bikes ✏️🚲

Another lovely week in Bumblebees… 🐝🫶💛

See you next week!
The Bumblebees team🐝

Hello Bumblebees families 👋

This week we have engaged in lots of sensory activities that follow our Spring topic ‘Penguins and Polar Bears’ 🐧🐻‍❄️

In our creative focus session, we used glue to squeeze and glitter to sprinkle on to our very own snow angels ❄️

Lots of the children enjoyed observing the adult sprinkling the glitter and then had a go themselves, they were all super confident with squeezing the glue! ✨

Our ‘bucket time’ was also themed around ice!🧊

This included having a go at an ice smash during ‘Stage 3’ with a frozen green and frozen pink ice hand ✋. The children in Bumblebees all took turns to feel the cold of the ice, and drop the ice from a height making a big SMASH 💥

This week, we have also had some more sensory fun during our morning activities including kinetic sand and lots of yummy edible things! 🤲

We also took a ride on the sensory train! 🚂

We ride the sensory train every Monday afternoon and love exploring bubble land, water land, material land and foam land 🫧💦🧱☁️

Our PSED theme this term is ‘This is Me’. Every morning we sing about our emotions during ‘If You’re Happy and You Know it!’. We have also initiated a new addition to our good afternoon routine – brushing our teeth!🪥

This is great for the children to learn about self care and we love to brush along to ‘Peppa Pig’s Teeth-brushing Song’ 💗

We are so proud of our Bumblebees!💛

See you next week👋

The Bumblebees team🐝

Welcome back Bumblebees💛

We hope you have had a wonderful, and hopefully restful, break over the last two weeks!

We are so excited to have all the children back ready for an exciting Spring term 🌼

This week, all the children have worked hard to settle back in to routines and begin their very first rotation of workstation activities. This is a daily opportunity for 1:1 interventions that support each child with building shared attention and engagement. It is also a great opportunity to work on your child’s individual PLT targets.

Some of this weeks 1:1’s included completing a puzzle independently using colour matching, shape and sorting skills. All of Bumblebees are great problem solvers! 🧩

We also worked on a communication ‘choosing bag’ activity! We are developing our skills on this.

We have also made big developments in just a week, on our engagement with ‘Bucket Time’. This has always been a favourite in Bumblebees, but the children have now begun engaging with stage 3! 🥳

This includes the children having a go at joining in with an activity on the carpet and developing a range of skills including observing, waiting, joining in and initiating an activity, and sharing attention with adults and peers in Bumblebees 🗣️

Take a look at some of our Stage 2 and Stage 3 pictures from this week…

Our bucket time has also drawn us nicely in to our new Spring term topic, ‘Penguins and Polar Bears’. This is a really exciting topic that has begun with our knowledge of winter weathers and the feeling of ‘cold’ 🧊

For the next two weeks we have been and will be focusing on ‘Snow is on my head’. This song has helped us thing about the key word ‘cold’, and a winter weather; ‘snow’. It has also included the body parts ❄️

Here are some activities we have engaged in this week to introduce our topic. We have completed ice paintings, spraying and unfreezing the iceberg, splatted snow mountains and even felt the ice on our tongues! ☃️

We also managed to complete two of our favourite parts of the week – music with Bev and swimming! 🎶🤿

The children are developing their engagement daily and I’m sure you can see this through our wonderful photos around the carpet during music or some lovely photos within swimming…

Have a lovely weekend!🤍

The Bumblebees team🐝

Welcome back Bumblebees!🐝

What a fun three days we have had!

This week we have been very artsy, which is something we love doing, to settle ourselves back in to school 🏫

There has been some great mark making opportunities, including drawing pretty daisies! 🌼

We have explored the different colours out on the track playground 🛝

We have completed some 1:1 colour matching, where the children showed us just how much they know about colours and utilising their matching skills!

Some children were also enjoying getting messy at the colour mixing station 🌈

and a favourite was driving the car wheels through the paint 🖌️🚙

What a brilliant first week back!

Well done Bumblebees🤍

The Bumblebees team🐝