St. Michael's CE School
Working Together For The Good Of All
“St. Michael’s Church of England School, established upon Christian foundations and living out the Christian faith, is committed to providing every child with an excellent education.”
SENSORY AND PHYSICAL
Sensory and/or physical needs
St. Michael’s school is well support by Wandsworth Visual Impairment and Hearing Impairment Services. Some children are on special programmes of support, devised, monitored and assessed by these services, and these programmes are usually carried out by the child’s Pupil Support or class Teaching Assistant.
We are also supported by the Occupational Therapy Service, which can help children with fine motor skills, gross motor skills and sensory processing difficulties.
Below are a few helpful tips from your Children’s Occupational Therapy team:
Your Therapy Source - Contains wonderful resources for developing motor skills, self-care skills and self-regulation
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde - Contains downloadable resources for child development and life skills
Motor skills and activities
Postural Program and Self-Regulation Strategies
NHS Change4Life - find indoor activities, accessible games and recipe ideas
Cerebral Palsy Sports UK have weekly updates: info@cpsport.org
The Royal College of Occupational Therapy has created a resource to support people who are undertaking social distancing and for families to support their children while schools are closed. This can be found here:
Sensory Room
Our Sensory Room is for all children at St. Michael’s school and is designed for our SEND pupils to support positive engagement and achieve positive outcomes through sensory stimulation which can be controlled, intensified or reduced according to the needs of the child. The two main aims of our sensory room is to provide relaxation and to encourage intellectual activity.
We are extremely lucky to have a Multi-Sensory Room at St. Michael’s. This room is a result of the generous fundraising by the PTA and working in partnership with the school to equip the room with amazing resources and create an environment reflecting our vision and mission.
This is an inclusive provision that will provide invaluable support and opportunity for all children in our school. Our sensory room offers a range of multi-sensory resources including lighting effects, bubble lamps, star projectors as well as a range of tactile experiences. A range of different toys to touch and experience, movable water floor tiles, and a range of textured balls and apparatus. The benefits of the sensory room include increased concentration, improved alertness, increased creativity, cognitive development, language development, improved social communication and interaction, physical and mental relaxation as well as a reduction in incidents of aggression, increased sense of calm (for adults and children).
Sensory Garden
A sensory garden is all about stimulating and engaging the five basic senses of sight, smell, sound, touch and taste. This type of garden not only allows you to connect to nature, but encourages you to become more aware of your surroundings and your response to them, tapping into the principles of mindfulness.
The sensory gardens improves physical fitness, health, mood and cognition. Gardening and plant care help children develop gross and fine motor skills. Time outdoors, breathing fresh air, and being exposed to sunlight are extremely beneficial to the children's overall physical health.
Our garden has a number of flowers and plants along with areas with objects that produce sound, colour and places to sit. The floor is multi-textured and we are very lucky to have a xylophone, coloured archway and wind chimes that were donated by 3 of our St Michael's families.
