A member of staff at our school has chosen a project which allows our young people to take part in The AQA Examinations Board Scheme. The scheme awards student’s certificates and recognition for completing units in various topics. These are not qualifications, rather a way to record learner achievement for pupils not yet ready to take public qualifications. Its ‘can do’ approach is used to boost student confidence, engagement, and motivation.
The boys are currently working on two of the units as part of their education.
The first topic the boys are working on is the Spanish language, the member of staff focused on conversationalteaching, useful vocab, and pronunciation of simple phrases for introduction and description along with everyday words to play games such as bingo, snap, pairs both online and in person. The boys are thoroughly enjoying this and have created a friendly sense of competition. They have also used props and Spanish foods, along with our conversational ability to engage in café role plays, which have been great fun too.
The boys second topic is cookery, in their lessons so far, they have discussed health & safety in the kitchen, learnt and practiced safe knife skills and learnt how to follow recipes, (recipe following has proven tricky for some of our young people at times, but their skills are improving!).
Students have discovered that small quantities of herbs and spices can make a great difference to the final dish both positively and, occasionally, negatively, in doing so learning that, quite often, ‘less is more’.
Stir-fry, curry, bread, meatballs & spaghetti along with a variety of cakes have proven very popular, and we also had the savoury dishes being eaten for lunch.
Our young people are learning the ability to tweak a recipe to tailor it to their own taste or for a vegetarian/vegan or someone with a food allergy. Every recipe is laminated and put into a plastic file which the young person will take away with them when they leave the school.
The boys are already asking to start a new unit and have been looking at gardening, which they are hoping to start during this term.