Dear Parents and Caregivers
And so it begins! Firstly, thank you for your support last week as we busily reckoned with the new restrictions that were about to come into place. Thank you also to those families who collected home-learning packs from the front office.
If your child’s pack has not yet been picked up, the office will be open on Tuesday 31 March from 9am to 1pm. If possible, it would be most helpful if you could venture in to collect it. If you are unable to do so safely, the year group home learning packs will also be uploaded onto the school website in due course.
Our advice for this first week is to approach your child’s home-schooling knowing that the transition will take time. Working from home will require trial and error in terms of scheduling and assisting, monitoring and motivating your child. The way that children adapt to their new situation is also unknown.
Please do not feel worried if you are unsure about the tasks that were included in the home-learning pack or if your child cannot access all the resources online. Try the activities with them first and then if you need assistance there are plenty of resources that will help on BBC Bitesize.
In the home-learning pack where it has suggested everyday activities, we understand it might not be possible to fit in all of these activities immediately so please do not feel pressured if not everything is completed every day this week. Use this time to figure out how to adapt in a way that best suits your child, yourself and your family’s situation.
We are keen to hear how things are working so please send any feedback (positive or constructive) by the end of the week. After Friday, we will review the current home-learning programme and determine the best next steps from there. Updates and/or revisions will then be uploaded to the school’s website and we will notify you of these uploads.
We are also in the process of attempting to upload reading videos/audios to the school’s website which will allow students to hear or see reading books aloud. We recommend a read-aloud at least once a day. Until we get these videos up and running, we encourage you to either read aloud to your child or use https://www.storylineonline.net/. This is a great website where actors are videoed reading stories. If the videos do not load on the website, just copy the video’s link, paste it into your browser’s address bar and you will be redirected to youtube where the video will play automatically.
We realise there is a lot to take in this week. Above all, go at your own pace for now and please keep in touch.
KS1/KS2 Teaching Team
