Sensory Circuits

Led by Mr. James! Sensory Circuits provide a sequence of activities done repeatedly to provide a child with the right type of sensory input in order to calm and organise them for the day ahead ready for learning to occur. Our circuits are active, physical and fun! 

Our Sensory Room

Our Sensory Room is a specially designed room which combines a range of stimuli to help our children develop and engage their senses. We have a vast range of lights, colours, sounds, sensory soft play resources and aromas all within a safe environment. It is a lovely space where our children can explore and interact safely. Our Sensory Room supports children to feel relaxed, more focussed, better able to communicate, improve visual, auditory and tactile processing and also fine and gross motor skills. 

Sensory Activities

Our Sensory Activities stimulate children's senses - touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. The activities help our children to interact with and make sense of the world around them. Sensory activities play an important role in a child's learning and development as much of our learning comes through our ability to use our senses to retain information. These activities also benefit many other areas of our children's development - enhancing memory, complex tasks and problem solving, fine motor skill development, language development, communication and social skills, memory and observational skills, creative and independent thinking and emotional regulation. 

Attention Autism

Led by Mrs. Hayley Wilcox! Attention Autism is and intervention approach by Speech and Language therapist Gina Davies. It aims to work on developing the early fundamentals of language including awareness of others, attention, listening, shared attention switching attention and turn-taking. Plus it is lots of fun!

Proprioception and Deep Pressure Activities

Proprioception is one of our body’s senses. Just as our eyes and ears send information about what we see and hear to the brain, parts of our muscles and joints sense the position of our body and send these messages to the brain as well. We depend on this information to know exactly where our body parts are and to plan our movements. Proprioception has a calming & regulating effect on our central nervous system.

Proprioception is achieved from active use of the muscles in ‘heavy work’ activities e.g. pushing, pulling, lifting, standing on tip-toes, crashing, chewing, sucking, and blowing. Use of hands for squeezing, pinching, or "fidgeting".

Deep touch pressure refers to a form of tactile sensory input which is often provided by firm holding, firm stroking, cuddling, hugging, and squeezing. Deep touch pressure acts as a calming or focusing agent which also has a calming & regulating effect on our central nervous system. 

We offer these activities in Ynystawe School to children who seek proprioceptive input in order to regulate their emotional and behavioural responses to sensory stimulation .

Dough Disco

Dough Disco is a fun activity which we carry out in Ynystawe School! It combines the use of play dough with a series of hand and finger exercises designed to improve fine motor control. The movements develop our children's fine and gross motor dexterity, hand-eye coordination and self-esteem!

Well Comm

Led by Mrs. Alison Dainty and Miss Sabrina Kind. WellComm is a speech and language toolkit which we use in Ynystawe School to identify any speech and language difficulty or delay which is key to the progressive development of a our children's overall development. The aim of WellComm Primary is to help us  identify children who may have speech, language and social communication needs and supports us to create an individualised programme for our children in a fun way!

Speech Link 

Led by Miss Sabrina Kind. We use the Speech Link toolkit in Ynystawe School to identify and support children with developmental speech sound difficulties. Being able to speak clearly, process speech sounds, understand others and to express ideas and interact with others are fundamental building blocks for our children's development. Our lovely speech link groups work on programmes to help the children produce and listen for sounds on their own, in words and in sentences. 

Well Being

At Ynystawe well-being is at the heart of all that we do and we are passionate about promoting this to our pupils. We have invested greatly in well-being to ensure that all children are happy, healthy individuals ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society. 

Miss Bethan Stote provides ELSA (Emotional Literacy Support Assistant) support. As well as additonal well being sessions for other pupils who need support, she has also created a post box for children to post any worries, questions, queries or anything they feel they would like to share.