Grow Essex

I gotta feeling oooh oooh. Braintree Sensations

The children at Braintree have enjoyed talking about and explaining their feelings using our life-sized ginger bread person. 

How do you feel?
I feel a bit squirmy, a tad jumpy and a little tense. :-))

E-Safety in Colchester North

E-Safety

For Safer Internet Day on the 11th of February 2020, the children at Colchester North have been learning all about how to stay safe online. The children made a laptop and created some rules to help them stay safe online.

Steve Jobs eat your heart out

Is this Clacton's answer to Vincent Van Gogh?

​We are very proud of our resident artist. This student uses their talent for art to help self regulate.

Please sit back and enjoy greatness in progress...

The Pig
The Eagle
The Dog

Chinese New Year Celebrations In Colchester

Fortune cookies, dragons and rats – it's Chinese New Year.

To find out more about what is special and valuable to others in the world, we have been finding out about Chinese New Year.We have also been practising some of our skills in design and technology to make felt rats and Chinese dragons. We used pneumatics in the dragons to make the dragon's nose move.  

Sensations At Colchester North

Sue Bell and Dimitra Theodoropoulou from Kids Inspire led an interesting and valuable training morning for the GROW teams at the start of this term. Part of our training was about learning how to ground ourselves. We had to 'stabilise' our feet and seat bones before being taken through a body scan and then draw the sensations we felt using patterns and symbols on a body map.  

At GROW Colchester North we had a go with the pupils. They weren't sure at first but soon one pupil was dozing off and another later filled her body map with sensations on her head, hands, feet and in her stomach. Her picture describing those sensations is below. She noted particularly how bright her eyes felt. Another pupil described his feet as being in long grass.  

Brain(caps)tree

At Braintree we are continuing to learn about how the brain works. We made brain caps 

We began by using paper-mache on half a balloon
Once it was solid it was painting time
Here are our caps!!!

Winter Paintings At Colchester North

At GROW Colchester North we having been looking at paintings of Winter. Work by Gogi Chagelishvili inspired one pupil to paint this cat.

Original
Better than the original??

Meet Diggory Doo

​Braintree's new super hero of self regulation.

Children have enjoyed learning with diggory-doo, who is helping them to understand and self-regulate their emotions.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas In Colchester

At GROW Colchester North the pupils have been enjoying the Christmas festivities at their schools.

Meanwhile at GROW they have been… Sewing hand puppets, decorating wooden tree decorations, making Christmas cards and tags, playing snowball table football and our favourite… indoor snowball fights. HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Persistence and perseverance

​Today in Braintree we were discussing the importance of persevering. We were all wonderfully surprised at the achievement of our students from when they first started with us till the present day. It just shows that when Grow children and Grow staff persist and persevere together, small miracles begin to appear.