Meerkat Class

Welcome to the Marvellous Meerkat page!

About Us

We're a lively and highly structured class that offers a range of techniques and practices to support each child's uniqueness.

Our learning is structured around the Beech Pathway. This delivers a unique and personalised curriculum to develop social communication and emotional regulation skills. Activities are tailored to encourage and develop the pre-requisites for learning including joint attention, engagement and participation, communication, mutual regulation and self-regulation. This curriculum is delivered in a highly structured environment with room for personalised flexibility within routines to meet a range of needs. Due to the nature of this curriculum, content is taught cross-curricular through highly motivating activities; including curriculum and multisensory.

Term 5 Timetable

Staff Development Day: Monday 15th April

Term Five Start Date: Tuesday 16th April

Term Five Last Day: Friday 24th May

Term Six Start Date: Monday 3rd June
Term 5 Focus

Hello/Good Afternoon
Pupils will say hello/good afternoon, share how they are feeling, identify their feelings on our 'Zone of Regulation' boards.

PE with George

This term, George will be leading the Meerkats during PE.

English (Sentence Building and Exploring Senses)
The pupils will be working on developing their knowledge of their senses as well as attempting to use Language Through Colour to help them choice make, create short phrases and build sentences.

Maths (Shape)
The pupils will be focusing on labelling 2D shapes - this includes exploring, naming and understanding properties.

Attention Autism (Bucket)
Bucket is a learning approach that aims to develop natural and spontaneous communication skills in children through the use of visually based and highly motivating activities.

Community Learning - Swimming and Shopping

We will be undertaking weekly visits to a Swimming Pool and then a Supermarket to purchase a snack. The majority of pupils will travel on the bus and then walk - developing their road safety understanding. The class will be making a choice and then using their cash to pay at the self check outs.

Opt-in Messy Play, Dough Disco, Creativity and Relaxation

During the opt-in sessions, pupils are encouraged and invited to take part in a range of motivating activities that target key skills and areas of knowledge. If the pupils decided not to opt-in, staff members will work on different aspects of their development bespoke to their needs and targets.

How We Learn

In Meerkat Class, we follow the TEACCH cycle (for Maths & English sessions).

This structured approach aims to:

Build independence.
Allow pupils to interact and communicate with peers.
Retain attention throughout the lesson.
Teach key functional skills.
Increase predictability.

The pupils rotate between three stations - Workstation, Group Table and Leisure.

Group Table
This is often the place in which new learning is introduced with a particular focus on English/Mathematics concepts as well adding the social element with peers too.

Workstation
Pupils will have short independent tasks pitched at their ability.

Leisure
A brain break for pupils, with an opportunity for them to relax, explore or initiate play amongst a variety of resources.

Important Information

Daily Key Essentials
Snack, spare clothes (including shoes), waterproofs, squash and drinks bottle, suncream, any personal aids (for communication or physical) and any medication.

Evisense
You will be able to track your child's progress through the use of photos and videos, using the online tool - Evisense.
If you need to support to access this please contact Jasmine.

Contact Details:

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions:

Jasmine McPherson

Meerkat Class Teacher and Beech Pathway Lead
j.mcpherson@stns.org.uk
01227 464316

Gallery

News update:

Term Four was a really fantastic term. It was amazing to witness each pupils' progress.

Please look out for our class trip happening in the middle of Term 5.

Home Learning:

If you would like to carry out some home learning with your child please see the documents below. These are to support with developing independence with some day-to-day activities.