Focusing on engagement and experience
Our informal curriculum allows us to focus on the essential pre-requisites for learning:
· Beginning to look and attend
· Beginning to communicate
· Beginning to relate
· Beginning to play
· Beginning to coordinate the body
· Overcoming personal barriers
Informal learning is learning to regulate, to manage emotions and to develop relationships with others. We work in small, highly specialist staff teams to provide environments where safe and secure relationships can develop and build. Trust and an important sense of belonging are key aims for our informal curriculum. Our students need us all to be attentive, encourage initiatives, receive initiatives, attune to all interaction and only then, when we have a solid connection can we guide and mediate learning.
Anchoring the day around strongly signalled routines provides a consistent, predictable and reliable structure where learning can be nurtured by familiar adults.
We see successful informal learning at Abbey Hill Academy every day. We see students who:
· want to respond to learning situations
· increase attention span
· have self-awareness and an awareness of others and of the environment
· interact with others
· begin to play
· begin to communicate
· begin to have fun
· increase sensory awareness and coordination
· respond to rewards and boundaries
· interact with objects and the environment
· overcoming personal barriers
Using a highly specialised, multi-sensory approach to teaching and learning and a range of adapted learning environments and resources we ensure our learners achievements are celebrated. Physical development, communication and language and personal, social and emotional development; the prime areas of learning drive our informal curriculum.
