Academic Curriculum

At Columbia Grange, we recognise the importance of developing children’s independence to ensure they develop the broad range of skills needed to transition successfully into the next stage of education, ultimately, aiming to preparing them for adulthood.

Independence, covers a range of areas including: travel, shopping, dressing and undressing, eating and drinking, toileting and hygiene. These areas are very much part of everyday life for us at Columbia Grange and the progress children make in these areas will determine how independent they will become in the future.

Travel
We recognise that independent travel is a difficult concept for children to master and understand that it is a combination of both skill based and process based learning. This means that, pupils will learn the process of travelling from one place to another by doing, and the more opportunities they have, the more secure their learning will be. The concept of developing children’s independence with travel begins in the classroom with key skills that need to be taught before transferring these skills into the community. They include; learning to stop, look, turn left/right, go forward, backward and to be aware of what is in front or behind you. We recognisee that these skills are essential concepts that are used when travelling within the community, knowing that it may not be enough to practise these only when out of school.

Shopping
We understand that the concept of shopping is mostly process based, meaning that pupils will learn the process of shopping by physically going shopping, in real shops, using real money and recognise that the more opportunities children have to do this, the more secure their learning will be. Children of all ages at Columbia Grange will have opportunities to go shopping as well as having opportunities to practise shopping within the classroom environment. Skills practised in school will include putting items into a bag, carrying items on a tray and queuing.

We recognise the importance of teaching children the concept of money. This begins with pupils learning to exchange money within the school environment at snack time and using purses or pockets at safe places to keep coins. It is important that class shops, cafés, snack opportunities etc should replicate the real world as much as possible, using real products at real prices. We will begin with small items such as biscuits, boxes of raisins, cartons of juice etc so that children can practise handling money, working up to children developing an understanding of budgeting and working out what they can afford to buy.

We promote the use of role-play areas which will allow children to practise the concept of shopping in a play situation, where items might be pretend but marked with the real price. This provides children with ongoing opportunities to practise Maths skills while allowing staff to continually assess the progress children are making.

Dressing and Undressing:
The act of dressing and undressing oneself completely independently can be a complicated and difficult process. In order for children to do this, there are a range of pre-requisite skills that are needed. These include:

Motor Skills: Being able to balance, coordinate movements, gross and fine motor skills e.g. being able to coordinate moements, balance and use the two halves of the body together in a coordinated way,
Sensory Skills: This includes visual and tactile skills; hand-eye coordination e.g. being able to track objects with eyes, discriminate differences in size and shape, handle different textures and identify objects by touch only.
Body Scheme: Body and spatial awareness e.g. Knowing where each body part relates in space, knowing that the body has two sides and a midline e.g. being able to pull a jumper over their head, pushing their arm through a sleeve without knocking into something or someone.
Hand Dominance
Organisational skills: Understanding the sequence of dressing e.g. putting clothes on in the right order, getting clothes the right way round and putting them on the right body part.

Although, dressing can be an activity which leads to anxiety and distress for children with sensory processing difficulties, we recognise the importance of building children’s tolerance to fabrics, textures or particularly items of clothing.

Eating and Drinking
We understand that eating and drinking can be difficult for some children due to their sensory needs. Staff understand that some children have safe foods which they rely on and we ensure children always have access to these foods/drinks. We provide children with opportunities to explore a range of food stuff as part of the curriculum, often linked to sensory play.

Toileting
Developing independence in toileting is an area of focus for children at Columbia Grange. We work in partnership with parents/carers to develop their confidence in this area, providing any additional resources where required, aiming for a consistent approach at school and home. Toileting plans are put into place for children who show signs that they are ready to begin this process and advice is sought from external agencies where necessary.

Hygiene
Teaching children the importance of personal hygiene is difficult for some children due to their sensory processing difficulties. We understand that some children have difficulties with tastes, textures, smells which all impact their ability to accept and tolerate elements of personal care and hygiene. Staff model personal hygiene and seek advice from external agencies including our Occupational Therapist, when needed.

Safety
We understand that teaching children the concept of staying safe is vital. The concept of safety will be taught through elements of Independence, however the main focus of this will be taught through the PSHE curriculum.

We consider the preparation for adulthood suggested outcomes provided in the Sunderland, SEND Ranges document and consider all four areas of SEND; Cognition and Learning, Communication and Interaction, Sensory and/or Physical and Medical needs and Social, Emotional and Mental Health. These outcomes are used as part of our EHCP process, ensuring that children’s EHCP reflects outcomes that children need to focus on in order to support their development and preparation for adulthood.

At Columbia Grange, we aim to support children to have sufficiently well-developed motor control of their arm, wrist, hand and fingers to hold a pen or pencil effectively, controlling its movement and forming letters, or to be able to use a keyboard to type.

To write meaningfully, children must have the motivation and inspiration to write in the first place. They need to understand that writing has meaning and that the words they write can be read back again. This understanding will come from seeing adults and others around them using writing for a purpose and modelling the use of written language in a range of contexts, such as shopping lists, birthday cards etc. At Columbia Grange, we aim for adults to find daily opportunities to model and encourage writing in everyday contexts. Early writing will often combine pictures, words, and symbols all in one text. Children may talk to themselves as they draw and write and will use symbolic representations alongside or in place of alphabetic code. They will enjoy adding symbols and words to their creations, for example adding signs and labels to their construction models, small world and role play representations or making a mini story book. We aim to develop writers who will understand the organisation of print, will use letter-sound relationships for writing and will understand that words are units of meaning.

We recognise there is a difference between exploratory and intentional mark-making. At first, children’s mark making experiences arise when children learn to handle mark making materials notice the marks their actions leave behind. As children’s marks become more deliberate, they will start to give meaning to their marks. We also recognise that the physical skills of writing depend on the development of gross and fine motor skills (see Physical Development curriculum). Muscle development begins with whole arm movements before moving to control at the finger tips.

What does pre-writing look like at Columbia Grange?

Dough Disco: Dough Disco involves moulding playdough, performing different actions such as rolling, flattening, pinching and squeezing while keeping to a beat of the music. In order to write effectively, children need to develop muscles in their hands and exercises such as Dough Disco support with this muscle development.

Action Songs: Listening to action songs can help develop children’s balance and coordination along with their gross and fine motor skills. Learning actions and rhymes together can help children learn the words and gives children the opportunity to listen, follow directions and develop their spatial awareness.

Arm and Shoulder Exercises: Activities such as crawl time, allows children to build core strength and shoulder stability. It is important to develop this strength to support with fine and gross motor skills, along with improved hand-eye coordination.

Tapping Sticks: Tapping sticks are easy for children to hold and supports the development of hand-eye coordination, listening skills, rhythm, beat and directionality. Children listen to a piece of music while tapping their sticks, following the instructions in the song. Movements include crossing the mid-line, moving horizontally, vertically, high and low.

Mat Man: Before children start to write, children need to understand the concept of body awareness including size, placement and sequence. During Mat Man sessions, children listen to a song and practically build ‘Mat Man’ using wooden pieces, placing parts of his body in the correct place. They then draw their own Mat Man, focusing on developing their understanding of where each part of the body is.

Sensory Play: Sensory play is used to assist the development of tactile awareness as well as developing hand-eye co-ordination and opportunities to cross the mid-line.

Write Dance: Write Dance is a mark-making and early writing activity that brings together movement, language and music. Children learn specific movements that develop gross motor co-ordination while working on their co-ordinated mark-making skills. They use movement to make the shapes that will eventually be needed to write.

Squiggle While You Wiggle: This is an early writing programme which incorporates dance, music and large movements to help children develop their fine motor control they need for writing. Children will learn a range of gross motor movements and will practise these while holding pieces of fabric and dancing along to the music. Children then transfer these movements to the floor level, swapping their pieces of fabric for writing tools to make marks. This could be in foam, on paper or in sand etc.

At Columbia Grange, we recognise that we have children working at different stages of mark-making and writing and have broken the stages into the following:
*Pre-Literate Writers
*Emergent Writers
*Transitional Writers
*Fluent Writers

Pre-Literate
This is the first stage of writing development which can be split into 4 developmental markers.
*The Scribble Stage: This is a form of mark-making that imitates the idea of writing. The marks will be placed anywhere on the page and will usually involve circular strokes and random marks. At this stage, we aim for children to communicate, when prompted, what each of these marks mean.
*The Symbolic Stage: At this stage, the marks have an intended message. Children might draw pictures such as smiley faces and there will be some random strokes which are intended to mimic writing. When asked, children may communicate the basic meaning of the marks.
*Directional Scribble: At this stage, there is a lot more intent with the marks made. Children will attempt to write from left to write and there will usually be some linear patter to this. Though there won’t be actual words or letters involved, just scribble, but there will be some intentional message behind the marks made.
*Mock Letters – At this stage, we see children creating their own attempt at writing letters.

Emergent

Emergent writing starts with strings of letters and then groups of letters. Children will begin to notice that words are grouped letters and not a single string. They will begin to break up their writing, although these letters won’t form words yet. At this stage, children often incorporate pictures into words e.g. a sentence about a dog might include a picture of a dog in place of the word. This stage involves a lot of relational imagery. Emergent writers will also begin to copy what they see around them and will replicate words they see regularly. At this stage of writing, letter reversals are common, but children are picking up the way that letters together, form a word.

Transitional

At this stage, children begin to use single letters to represent sounds or whole words e.g. ‘I went home’ might be written as ‘I w h’. The next development point moves into letter representation, where a word might be represented by the first and last letter e.g. ‘dog’ being written as ‘dg’. Medial letter sounds end the transitional stage of writing. Children will use their phonic knowledge to make plausible attempts to spell simple words.

Fluent
Phrase writing is the first step of this stage and is a way for children to convey a message alongside their illustrations. There will be a mix of all skills previously development, but this time the writing becomes readable. Sentence writing is the last stage of writing development.

Due to the needs of our pupils, we recognise that moving from one stage of development to the next can be a lengthy process. Teachers plan a range of activities to provide new and creative opportunities for children to develop the skills at each stage of development. These opportunities include:

*Mark making activities in continuous provision
*Activities to develop fine-motor skills
*Opportunities to practise letter formation
*Sentence construction activities e.g. Colourful Semantics

We recognise that due to physical limitations or neurodiversity, some pupils will not write in the conventional way, however recognise that a pupil’s inability to hold a pencil or engage in conventional writing tasks will not limit their ability to communicate in print. Pupils are provided with a range of alternative means of ‘writing’ such as PECS, symbol-supported writing or computer technology.

At Columbia Grange, we aim to nurture independent communicators and confident readers. We want children to develop a love of reading; to read for pleasure and to understand the importance of reading to function independently in society. In order to do this, we provide children with the continued use of rich vocabulary, prioritising the essential skills needed to develop language and communication. We understand that our children learn in different ways and therefore aim to teach pupils the skills they need to read and communicate in ways relevant to their individual needs. All pupils will have opportunities to read and be read to every day and will be provided with a language-rich environment with high quality books and resources. We aim for children to become inquisitive about books and to enjoy reading or being read to.

A wide range of strategies are used to teach reading at Columbia Grange in order to bed meet the needs of its pupils, many of which whom have difficult with auditory or visual processing, long and short memory or other difficulties which are prerequisites to proficient reading (and writing). Phonics is taught using the Little Wandle Letter and Sounds programme, however we understand that pre-reading skills must be developed before a formal Phonics programme is taught. Pre-reading is taught through the Little Wandle Foundations to Phonics programme.

Little Wandle teaches phonics in a systematic, synthetic way and promotes speaking and listening skills, phonological awareness and oral blending skills.
Pupils revisit the same phonemes and graphemes many times so they become embedded, aiming for children to become automatic in their recognition of phonemes.

We will build on children’s strengths, whilst teaching new strategies to support reading new words. Year 1 pupils will complete the phonics screening check if they are working above Phase 2 in the Little Wandle programme.

At Columbia Grange, we recognise that we have children working at different stages of our curriculum and have broken it down into the following:

*Pre-readers
*Emerging Readers
*Developing Readings – Phonics / Developing Readers – Sight
*Applying Readers

What does this look like?

Pre-readers
Developing pre-reading skills are an essential part of the Reading curriculum at Columbia Grange. Pre-reading skills focus on teaching children to tune into sounds, remembering them and gradually being able to name them. Children working on the pre-reading curriculum, will be taught Foundation to Phonics, which incorporates environmental sounds, body percussion, instrumental sounds and rhyme. At this level, we aim to develop visual and auditory skills, before learning symbolic representation and pre-reading skills. This includes early tracking skills, self-awareness, a sense of rhythm, pattern an order and communication skills. For some children, these fundamentals will be a continuous process throughout their time in school. Children will use communication strategies including PECS, Makaton and Intensive Interaction. Pre-readers will have a high focus on sensory stories, story massage, the use of objects of reference, eye gaze tracking, action rhymes and songs and Tac Pac as well as being exposed to a range of signs and symbols.

Emerging Readers
Emerging readers will continue to build on pre-reading skills in more detailed, complex ways. Children will work on developing the following skills:
*Symbolic discrimination – allowing children to process visual information in a symbol.
*Awareness of sound – being able to produce and imitate sounds e.g. animal noises.
*Auditory discrimination – children listening attentively to a range of sounds e.g. environmental, instrumental and body sounds.
*Left to right sequencing in a range of functional contexts.

We aim for children to develop early reading skills such as recognising familiar logos, symbols and personalised high frequency words such as their names, favourite characters etc. Children will continue to access Foundations for Phonics, developing early sound awareness, alongside personal sight vocabulary. They will develop an understanding that books convey meaning. Emerging readers will have access to sensory stories, now and next boards, personalised sight vocabulary through motivational interests (could incorporate logos), role play and small world, functional lists using symbols to show a sequence of events e.g. getting dressed, matching words/pictures/symbols and applying simple functional independent reading skills e.g. self-registration/ordering lunch.

Developing Readers – Phonics
Pupils who can read a range of personal sight vocabulary and have Little Wandle Foundation for Phonics embedded are now ready to move onto more formal reading strategies. These pupils will focus on reading for meaning and will aim to retrieve information from text. They will be working on phonological awareness skills and language comprehension skills that include:
*Grapheme-phoneme correspondence
*Blending and segmenting
*Decoding
*Learning tricky words.
*Reading a range of carefully selected high quality texts with an adult in groups or individually, aiming to develop language comprehension skills.
*Identifying features of a book e.g. pictures and words
*Making simple predictions and answering simple retrieval and inference questions.
*Developing one-to-one correspondence with finger pointing.

Developing readers will take individual reading books home (linked to learning in Phonics lessons) and will have individual reading sessions with staff in school. They will complete simple comprehension tasks and will have opportunities for reading to be embedded into their school day e.g. role play areas which encourage purposeful reading as well as a focus on developing real world reading skills while visiting their local area.

Sight Vocabulary might be taught in the following ways:
Personalised high interest vocabulary
This would include words linked to interests of the individual child. The learner might suggest them or they may be suggested by family or friends. It is important that this starts small, growing over time.

Personalised topic related vocabulary
This would include words which relate to topics of interest or topics which are being taught in class.

Social sight vocabulary
Social sight words are those which children are most likely to encounter in their immediate environment and are words children need to understand to function independently. This could include words such as Entrance, Exit, Push, Pull, Stop etc as well as signs used in a supermarket to label key items. This could also be common logos or signs that the child will see in their local environment.

Personalised high frequency vocabulary
Most high frequency words can not be represented pictorially and therefore it can be more difficult to teach these words. Starting with a few high frequency words is important, using them in context when reading motivational words/phrases.

Developing readers will take individual reading books home (linked to learning in Phonics lessons) and will have individual reading sessions with staff in school. They will have opportunities for reading to be embedded into their school day e.g. role play areas which encourage purposeful reading as well as a focus on developing real world reading skills while visiting their local area. It is important to note that developing understanding is a particular focus for this group of children.

Applying Readers
These children will move beyond early reading. They will have a secure knowledge of all phase 2 and 3 phonemes and will continue to work on their fluency and comprehension skills while learning Phase 4 and Phase 5. Children will continue to have daily Phonics lessons (Little Wandle) and will be taught reading skills including inference and deduction, comprehension, fluency and sentence construction.
Children will continue to take individual reading books home (linked to learning in Phonics lessons) and will have individual or group reading sessions with staff in school. They will have opportunities for reading to be embedded into their school day e.g. role play areas which encourage purposeful reading as well as developing real world reading skills within the local community such as locating shops and following shopping lists etc.

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