Welcome to the Cedar Lodge School Just Giving page. We are a special school in North Belfast and cater for young people with complex special educational needs.

The support that our Therapeutic Services have provided to pupils, families and staff throughout this challenging year has been invaluable. So much so, that we are already planning on expanding this provision throughout the school and are aiming on raising £5,000 to fund additional therapeutic support services and introduce a new member of staff, our very own Cedar Lodge Therapy Dog!

"Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) is simply more than spending time with an animal. It involves specific therapeutic goals and strategies and outcome measures. Therapeutic experiences for an animal, as well as processing the experience of trying to achieve a given task.

Animal Assisted Therapy improves the mental, physical, social and emotional functioning with the aid of animals. Animal are accepting, non-threating and non-judgemental manner. Making it easier for people, children to open up.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF ANIMAL ASSISTED THERAPY?

Some of the benefits of animal assisted therapy include:

- Improve motor skills

- Improved balance

- Increased focus and attention

- Increased self-esteem, self- confidence

- Reduced anxiety, grief and isolation

- Increased trust, empathy

- Greater self-control

- Improved social skills

- Reduced need for medication"

Please visit - https://adni.org.uk/our-dogs/therapy-dogs/overview/ for more information.

We would love to see everyone getting involved in a whole school challenge during the last month of this academic year. Please consider joining us in this exciting opportunity.

We are challenging members of our school community (pupils, parents/guardians, staff and families/friends) to get active during the month of June commencing of 1st June.

Why not either walk/run/swim 25/50/100km or cycle 500/1000km individually or even as a team. It's all about giving it a go and staying active.

As a school we are hoping to travel virtually the distance from Cedar Lodge to our partner school Sozizwe Special School in Johannesburg, South Africa which is a total of 11668 km. We will keep you up to date with our progress.

We are asking participants to log their weekly distances on the Google Form - https://forms.gle/15KPytH9i4hTMcdY8

or

Download the Free Strava App and join the Cedar Lodge School Club page - https://www.strava.com/clubs/925802 if you log your activity through Strava it will automatically upload onto the Club page.

We have travelled so far already this year as a school community, now let's see if we can take it to the next level. Thank you for your support and I'm looking forward to seeing how active we can be together.

Mr Murphy

Principal