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Tried and tested products clapping, and moving their arms or legs. We have considered other online exercise programmes but they are expensive. This one offers good value for money. Every member of staff has access, using it at different times of the day and on different occasions. That said, it is used a little less frequently during the summer term, when staff take children outside into the sun for their short bursts of exercise. It is accessible, straightforward to use and easy for pupils to copy, learn and have an invigorating break – a good use of primary sports funding. * Games Mark is a government-led awards scheme that recognises schools’ commitment to developing competition across their site and community. http://bit.ly/sc231-02 Over 50% of students at Oak View School have autism and the copy-and-sequence routines work well for them A few routines are a little complex for some of our students and not all are perfectly accessible from a wheelchair. However, with support from staff, most pupils can do partial movements – for example, just moving a leg in a certain direction. We use the exercise routines at the start of the day as a stimulant, and turn to the relaxation routines if pupils are becoming too exuberant, as these put them back into a calm place ready to access learning. At the time of writing, I was also acting headteacher at Wells Park, a special primary school for children with social, emotional and mental health difficulties, and I invested in a site licence for this school too. Here, it has been particularly successful with boys. Using the programme is straightforward. After logging on, you select one of three levels of difficulty, and then the type of activity. The sessions last just five minutes, and pupils follow the instructions, which are sometimes verbal and sometimes visual. Those who can, stand up as they embark together on a sequence of marching, twisting, turning, A whole-school licence for 5-a-Day TV is £16.99 a month. For an additional fee of £4.99 a month, students can also access it online at home. www.5-a-day.tv Michelle Kelly was formerly deputy headteacher of Oak View School, Loughton, Essex, and is now headteacher of Wells Park Primary School, Chigwell, in the same county Enabling pupils with literacy difficulties to access the curriculum – Joanne Thornton Some pupils have difficulty reading for many reasons, including a visual impairment or dyslexia. At the same time, schools do not always have enough TAs available to read passages of text to them. Even when they do, TAs may need to read very slowly, pause after each phrase, or even read a passage several times to allow pupils with working memory or attention difficulties to process the material properly. Meanwhile, having an adult constantly at their elbow reading to them is bad for a pupil’s self-esteem. They want to be able to learn independently, like their typically developing peers. The solution is Kurzweil, an integrated reading, writing, and study-skill support program that enables learners as young as four to access almost any text at their own pace using headphones. The program handles print documents of any length, even ones with lots of graphics, as well as digital and web-based content. Using a splitter allows several pupils to work together on the same material. Being very intuitive, the program is easy to learn and use. Pupils simply scan in a document, adjust the reading speed and decide how they want the program to read it out – word by word, sentence by sentence or a paragraph at a time – giving them the processing time they require. They can also change the text size and background colour. The dictionary facility enables them to look up words, see and hear the definition and find synonyms. To support their study skills, pupils can highlight text on the screen in up to six colours and then choose to display the information in columns, one for each colour, making it easy to do character analyses in English literature, say. Alternatively, they can cut and paste key paragraphs into another file and have these read back to them, or use the text as a model for their answers, amending the words to suit their purposes. The dictaphone facility allows them to capture their thoughts as they go, while the sticky notes facility supports speech recognition. As a teacher, I use these to help me differentiate worksheets quickly, annotating them with audio notes, which might ask pupils to find a synonym for something in the text or explain how I want them to answer a question. The program means that pupils are now willing to tackle activities they baulked at 48 Special Children 231 www.optimus-education.com/sc231
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