Resources for Nursery/Reception learning for an older child.

[TarquinMoriartyGruntfuttockII]

OK, I have a strange situation here. I live and work in a school abroad. I've been asked to support a child who should be in Year 2 but is in Year 1 but due to being diagnosed with severe learning disabilities a lot, but not all, of her capabilities are appropriate for a child in nursery/reception. I know the teacher is going to be sorting her lesson plans to meet her needs but there are going to be times when I will need to sit and do worksheets etc. with her and I am looking for fun, printable resources that I can have to hand for English and Maths and other parts of the the curriculum. Our topic for next term is to be plants and animals and how they grow etc.

Just so you know I do not have a teaching or classroom background so I am learning on my feet here.

Any help is much appreciated. If I haven't given enough or the right information just shout.

To be honest with you, if she's working at Reception level then you don't want worksheets - you want games and activities. She'll need her learning to be very practical and very visual.

So in Maths it will be counting actual objects for example. Maybe you have a tray with some cubes on which she counts then she then closes her eyes and you take some (ie 1 or 2 or 3) away and she has to work out how many you've taken. Or you go and count how many trees there are outside or how many posts on the fence or how many steps to walk along the corridor.

Can she read or write much? If it's independent writing, could she dictate to you so you scribe for her? There are loads of phonics games you could play to help her build up her reading/spelling - the relationship between the sound she hears and how it is written on the page.

For plants and animals and how they grow, I would imagine the whole class will be planting seeds, going out and about looking at different plants growing etc. Maybe she'd need to repeat the activities the others do - often a child with learning difficulties needs to over-learn ie do the same thing much more often than many other children in order to secure the knowledge.

Perhaps she'll need to sequence pictures ie a baby, toddler, child, teenager, adult, old person. She could put them into order and then you could work out together a sentence to go with each picture.

Is that the sort of information you were looking for? When you've got a better idea of her capabilities and also how much will be provided by the class teacher, then let us know and I'm sure people here will be able to point you in the right direction.