SEN Support during the Covid 19 School Closure

SEN Support during the Covid 19 School Closure

Stories explaining why you can’t see your friends:

• A Book For Children .PDF- by Elizabeth Jenner, Kate Wilson & Nia Roberts Consultant: Professor Graham Medley Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Please click here to download a copy.

• The whole world is talking about the corona virus. Daycares and schools have closed, and children are asking a lot of questions. This movie uses PLAYMOBIL to help explain in a way that children can understand what is happening right now, what we can all do to ease the situation, and why it so important to avoid contact with other children and adults.                  Please click here to see the youtube video.

• COVID 19: I Can Help! by Carol Gray. A Children's guide to how they can help with the Covid virus.  Please click here to download a copy.

• What is Coronavirus? - PDF document Please click here to download a copy. 

Stories explaining why you can’t see your friends

• Little Puddings - Please click here for a PDF copy

• Time to come in bear - A social distancing youtube video. Please click here to view. 

Fine Motor Skills

• Online, daily activities to support fine motor skills. Please click here to go to the website. 

Autism Support

Structure and work box – tips for autism (and others!)

In my experience when working with children with autism, routine, consistency and clear expectations are key.  However, this advice is the same for schooling any child.  The clearer you are with your plan and expectation the easier it will be for them to understand what they need to do.  A visual timetable will be really helpful.

The timetable, finished box and workstation concepts can easily translate into the home environment.  Whilst the core idea of the workstation is that children will be working independently in the long term.  You can also use the structure at home for work that they need help with.  The ‘work’ and ‘finished’ boxes give all children a great visual indicator of how much they need to do.

To set up work boxes you will need boxes and folders.  You can use any box, you just need to make sure it’s clear one is work and one is finished.  Often a different colour is used for each to help to clearly identify them.  For the folders you could use plastic sleeves if you have them, but zip lock bags will work just as well!

What do I put in the work box?

This will be very individual for each child.  Initially the goal is to set up the routine.  So, choose easy quick activities that the child can do.  Spend the first week or two week or as long as you need setting the structure.  It’s work time, you sit, you do each activity until it’s finished, then you move to the next thing on your schedule.  Some easy activities include threading, puzzles, matching numbers, tracing over numbers and colouring in.  Once the routine is established you can then start to change the items in the box.

This system gives you the flexibility over the work children are doing. If you’re receiving work from school this would be a perfect additional to the work box. You can make the work harder.  You can add in more things.  If you can see they are unwell that day then you can put easier things into the box.  If you know that you need to be finished earlier to make a call then you can put less in.  The main thing is that you keep the structure/format the same.

Autism Friendly Social Stories - please click here to download a pdf

Helpful Tips from our Play Therapist  

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Nessy

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