What does ‘accessible’ mean when we are looking at supporting children with SEN to engage learning? For me, it means making learning meaningful through using the senses, and making something relevant for the children. Take the KS2 topic of Roman Britain and the Roman Empire, for most children traditional teaching methods will help them to learn a little about this time in history. But for a child with SEN, working at P-Scales or pre-key stage descriptors, this may not be relevant.
When looking at the history P-Scales, some of the assessment areas are around showing an understanding of past and present, using simple sentences to describe artefacts and re-telling a simple story.
This is all well and good, but how can this translate the the classroom? I suggest choosing a story that has a clear start middle and end, with my class last year all working at P-Levels or emerging into National Curriculum, we chose the story of Romulus and Remus.
The basic story goes a little like this (but google this and you will find more detailed versions)
There was once a vestal virgin called Rhea Silver, and she became pregnant through the God Mars. She gave birth to twin boys and named them Romulus and Remus. Rhea Silver’s father was very angry and locked her away and ordered the boys to die. The servants who took the boys couldn’t do this, and instead sent them in a basket down the River Tiber. A wolf rescued the boys from the river and fed them milk, she took the basket with the babies to a local shepherd who raised them as his own sons. As the boys grew into men, they wanted to create a new city, and so set off to find the perfect location. They began to argue and couldn't decide on anything. One day, they argued so much that Romulus killed Remus, and named his new city Rome and became the first ruler of this new city.
In terms of creating work around this we made small smelling bags of the herbs that would have been typical of the time, we also put these out in the messy play tray mixed with rice and containers. We carried out regular dressing up activities, some using nice smooth cloth to be the rich Romans, and rough hessian to be the poorer citizens, this gave tactile input. We turned the story into a drama activity, we had ‘magic water’ that transported us back in time and used visuals to support the different parts of the story. For the children that needed it, we had things such as water for the river, fur for the wolf, bricks for the building of the new city etc. so that everyone whether verbal or not could join in re-telling the story. We made mud bricks to build the city (search on pinterest) and in lego club made different famous Roman buildings. In PSED we played games around solving conflict, this children were all really good at identifying that Romulus could have found another way to deal with the situation. The Romans created some interesting engineering feats and so we looked at roads and aqueducts, using lots of resources to re-create these key features. This topic lasted 6 weeks, and we were able to base all our maths and literacy around this, as well as the topic. We kept returning to the story of Romulus and Remus, and by the end the children could all tell you how Rome came to be.
At the start of each topic I make sure I do a fair bit of research, and create a topic board or images before I begin. This means that you have some idea of where you may be heading, but have plenty of ideas to move the children’s learning on if they get a little stuck or bored!
Good luck in turning your topic into something creative, Pinterest and Twinkl are both great resources to gather ideas.
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