Primary Years Special Education

Sonja Adam
Head of Primary Years Special Education

Sonja is Head of the new Primary Years Special Education (PYSE) programme and the PYSE class at ICS. Sonja has been supporting children’s learning at ICS for seven years and she worked as the Student Support Coordinator for the last four years. It has been a pleasure for Sonja to learn and grow in special education and in inclusive education management. She is excited to set up the new PYSE programme which is aimed to help families in need of an individualised and inclusive approach for their children with learning support needs.

Sonja is passionate about inclusive education and the value of specialized educational settings. She is committed to equal opportunities in differentiated learning environments in which students can reach their personal potential. Sonja has a professional background in mainstream and special education in Germany, Brazil, Mozambique and the United Kingdom.

Sonja graduated as a preschool teacher in Germany in 1993, and two years later as a Kindergarten teacher for Steiner Waldorf Schools. She worked in this field as a class teacher until 2001 when she discovered as a ‘Volunteer Reading Aid’ her passion for working with individual children to succeed in learning.

Sonja completed a Bachelor of Education (B Ed Honours) degree and her MA degree in Special and Inclusive Education (Psychological Perspectives) at the Institute of Education (University of London). The main focus of her MA was concerned with reading development and literacy remediation. Sonja is a certified Learning Support Teacher at Steiner Waldorf Schools, and she completed remedial teaching courses with Orton Gillingham and Lindamood-Bell. She also has a CELTA and is a teacher for those with English as a Foreign Language (EFL).
Besides Sonja’s commitment to ICS, Sonja enjoys working for Skola International Trust for Special Education (SITSE) which promotes special and inclusive education at a local as well as international level.

PYSE curriculum

The Primary Years Special Education (PYSE) programme provides a curriculum which is based on a variety of acclaimed approaches with the aim to provide individualised learning through highly specialised individual educational programmes to help students reach their potential in a small classroom setting with a maximum of 6 children of mixed age.

The class is designed for those children with special educational needs (SEN) who find it difficult to make progress and to access the mainstream curriculum, despite strong modifications of the general learning tasks and despite intensive in-class learning support assistance.

The class is staffed with one Head teacher specialised in Literacy/Language and Maths remediation and two additional experienced SEN teachers. The PYSE department is independent from the mainstream and student support departments and it collaborates closely with both departments to realise an inclusive school experience for the students in the class and throughout the school.

The PYSE curriculum is the foundation for students to be able to gradually access the student-centred, inquiry based International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IB PYP) on which the mainstream curriculum at ICS is based on. The PYSE programme will access the PYP curriculum as it seems fit for the individual student.

Individualised learning

The students in the PYSE class will be guided by their teachers through their own intensive learning programmes on a daily basis, e.g. Literacy/Language, Maths, Unit of Inquiry, Social Skills and Adaptive Behaviour programmes. The programmes are enriched by at least three hours per week of intensive one-to-one or group therapy sessions. These personalised and tailor-made programmes are designed with the input of a multi-disciplinary team, consisting of the teachers of the class, the Speech and Language therapist, the Occupational therapist, the Child Psychotherapist and the Director of Student Support who also is an Educational Psychologist.

The programme of each student is designed after careful consideration of their previous learning experience and careful assessment of their existing skills as well as their personal learning styles. Each programme is strength-based, i.e. it utilises each student’s preferred learning style.

The TEACCH approach and The 5 P’s approach will be the frameworks in which students will be individually instructed. These approaches will enable the students to develop skills to complete set tasks within a given timeframe with increasing independence.

Language / Literacy and Maths

The curriculum of the PYSE programme is language-based, strongly supported by the Speech and Language therapist, and taught through multi-sensory activities. It utilises methods of internationally acclaimed programmes, e.g. Orton-Gillingham, Singerland, Alpha to Omega, Ronald Davis, Lindamood-Bell.
The programme makes particular use of the Lindamood-Bell toolboxes: ‘Seeing Stars’, ‘Visualising and Verbalising’ and ‘On Cloud Nine’.

The ‘Seeing Stars’ programme is designed to develop fluent decoding and to teach sight words, spelling, and contextual fluency; and brings phonemic awareness to a level of automaticity.

The ‘Visualising and Verbalising’ programme stimulates concept imagery, attention skills and memory, while developing students’ language comprehension, thinking and expressive language skills.

The programme ‘On Cloud Nine’ teaches Maths through concept and numeral imagery which are integrated with language and applied to math computation and problem solving. There is emphasis on both mathematical reasoning and mathematical computation.

Learning with other students and Inclusion

The personalised programmes also include holistically designed whole class instructions and group activities which help students develop a more balanced set of skills and identify as a member of their class. These activities partly focus on life skills taught through drama, social games, and outings. Art and Music is taught to the whole class, not only to develop artistic skills, but above all to help students to achieve inner balance and well-being. In addition to the weekly sports lessons, students engage in regular movement exercises for developing dexterity, coordination, and sensory modulation.

In addition, the programme allows for students of the class to join their year-groups for subjects like sports, swimming, and singing assembly. The programme also encourages students of the mainstream classes to visit and join in for certain class activities which could be socially or academically beneficial to them. The students of the PYSE class will be, like any child at the school, fully included at ICS. They will join assemblies, break-times, lunch, school trips, and participate at school events.There is also the option for PYSE students at the age of 9 years and above to participate with an assistant at the successful Skola Travel & Learn trips to overseas destinations to experience the world as a classroom and to develop their confidence, self-esteem and independence away from home and school.