Resources - Autumn Term.

Year 7 Resources - Autumn Term

www.briteschool.co.uk Each week M has 8 hours of formal classes with this provider. These are small live groups, run by qualified teachers and are aligned with the NC. M would be in Year 6 were he still at school so he joins the English, Maths and Humanities primary classes. He also joins the KS3 science group as this is where his passions lie. Homework for each class is set weekly.

The lessons are recorded, so if M misses the inference of a term used in the live class discussion then he is able to listen to the recording after the lesson. This is incredibly useful for a child with a social communication disorder. It is also helpful for him to be able to participate in live group work and team projects as this was something he was unable to do in mainstream school. The confidence he has gained from feeling able to contribute to the group has been lovely to see over the last year. Class sizez are small - M's largest set only contains 8 pupils and the average seems to be about 6.

For a child with anxiety and sensory issues attending Briteschool means he gets the benefits of "school" in terms of peer interaction, specialist subject teaching, group participation, structure & routine etc with none of the sensory overwhelm that made mainstream school so unbearable for him.

M's learning resources

Note these resources supplement the work M does with his online school, they are not intended to form a complete curriculum. Homeschooling offers us the chance to build upon M's strengths and support his additional learning needs in a way that's not possible in mainstream school. In addition the LA points us towards some specialist resources at our termly meetings, which in order to preserve M's privacy I will not be posting here.

Literacy & Language

M is not yet a confident reader and has receptive language issues. This presents challenges across the whole curriculum. His motor co-ordination issues also hinder progress in the usual way with writing. In order to address these issues we've separated out the various literacy learning strands so that he can focus on learning a specific skill at any one time rather than becoming to overwhelmed. e.g We either focus on content OR on handwriting at present, only combining the two for shorter pieces of work than is the norm for his age group. In this way we've found progress can be made without M becoming overwhelmed at the scale of the task.

Active Listening:-

We are using the following sites for their audio stories. This allows us to focus on discussing the content of the story and gradually improves M's comprehension skills over time.

Storynory.com - the narrator's voice can be slowed down to help pick out individual syllables in words using audacity software. This enabled M to make progress with phonics last year, and so will be continued throughout year 6.

This terms long text. For sheer fun we are currently listening to the audio story for "How to train your Dragon" available here:- LINK. In October there is a live webcast by the author we will be tuning into. In November we are going to the free screening of the animated film run by the Intofilm festival with some of his Home ed friends. We will be looking for the differences between the animated film version of the story and the book version as part of our discussions.

https://www.flatstanley.com/ We have purchased the "World Adventure Series", and will be listening to this, before joining the UK creative writing scheme next term.

We also use storylineonline &; reading planet if nothing catches our eye on our weekly trip to the library.

Reading

http://www.headsprout.com This course is popular with ASD/SCD students as it offers a highly structured, precision taught, structured reading comprehension course. However we are having trouble logging in at present, following a move to a new support platform. Very frustrating, but hopefully the customer service staff will demonstrate their usual efficiency and we'll be back on track in the next day or so.

For fun we will trial the free 2 week trial of a programme called reading eggs, just to add a little variety to our termly programme.

We have a weekly trip to the library where M can borrow books from the High Interest/Low ablility list (seperate blog post) for his daily reading practice.

Writing

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Daily-Language-Review-Grade-1/dp/1557996555/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410446441&sr=1-1&keywords=evan-moor+daily+language+grade+1 Our daily literacy programme. As M has real difficulty with writing this will take us approx 30 mins to an hour. I'd expect most children to complete it in 10-15 minutes. We both like the structure of the Evan Moor Literacy resources so we shall be trying several titles in the literacy series this year.

Writing Programme We are following a well known OT supported handwriting programme

Geography

Europe resource from Evan-Moor as our starting point. It's intended for US Grades 3-6 which translates to UK grades 2-6.

We are using a free resource from this site to begin an investigation into the food production of grains. Monday mornings are particularly fun as we start the week by preparing a "global breakfast" together and discussing the culture of the nation it comes from. In the spring we'll plant some heirloom seeds from http://www.realseeds.co.uk and produce our own grains just for fun.

Science

M loves science and his interest in this area is his motivation for trying hard at the literacy work he finds so challenging.

Basic Science MOOC Future learn offers some fantastic resources for pupils from secondary level onwards (M started KS3 Science in Term 3 of Year 5).

DT - we are doing our electronics wizards apprenticeship this year. Expensive but hopefully worth it.

http://www.my-gcsescience.com This is a GCSE site we use when M wants to research furtherr on a topic that catches his attention.

Maths

Sadly a very chequered school career prior to Home Ed has left gaps in M's knowledge of the basics. While he enjoys his Briteschool lessons it's important that we spend time identifying and filling in those gaps. As a result we do some daily remedial maths practice. Last year we used mathswhizz for this task in order to track progress easily. However by Easter we were bored, so regular useage became more sporadic in favour of montessori type games.

This term we are working through a skills sharpener series with Evan-Moor starting with US grade 1 (UK Year 2). Link to resource here. We may use an IT based resource later on in the year if we feel we need it, but for the moment, this seems a good place in our day to encourage paper and pencil usage.

General

We like Neokid12 for the videos and quizzes. This term M is learning biology with Briteschool in his junior science, so we've used this resource for homework research and revision.

Khan academy - this site is used for all sorts of topics.

Make me genius - simple video animations that explains science some maths topics.

Mum -

When I feel it is relevant, I'll include the details of any additional training, conversations or courses I may undertake to support our journey.

2 free MOOCS with Coursera.org.

https://www.coursera.org/course/digitalstorytelling

Digital storytelling training for educators

https://www.coursera.org/course/dyslexiaintro

Supporting children with difficulties in reading and writing

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