Arrangements for Home Learning for the Summer Term

Dear Parents,

I hope and your families are keeping well in these unprecedented times. As we break for the Easter holiday, I am writing to update you regarding our plans for supporting the children’s learning going forwards.

From the start of next term, teachers will be setting work for their classes on a weekly basis.

When considering how to support families with helping their children to learn at home, we considered a number of factors:

• Many parents are still working at home, and are consequently busy throughout the day;
• Not all families have suitable technology or internet access to learn online, and in some households, the laptops, tablets etc. are being used for other things, e.g. working from home, meaning children can’t access them;
• Not all parents feel equally confident at teaching their children.

Therefore, we intend to provide work in a way that gives families consistency from week to week and allows children to access some of the tasks without the need for large amounts of input.

Class pages will be added to the website, on which teachers will publish a weekly selection of learning activities.

These weekly schedules will include activities in maths and English as well as a selection of additional tasks from other areas of learning, designed to be enjoyable and manageable. To avoid the over-reliance on online learning, we have ordered workbooks for the children to use, in both maths and reading comprehension (Reception and Y1 children will have phonics workbooks rather than comprehension books). In school, we will also be making additional workbooks over the Easter break, which will provide weekly spelling and handwriting practice, and some opportunities for paper-based practice of times tables and number bonds.

This means each child will have a paper-based pack of learning materials to use at home through the summer half-terms, which will be supplemented on the weekly schedule by links to online learning activities (for example in maths) for those who want them and can access them.

We appreciate that all children’s home circumstances are different, so there will not be any formal expectation of completion attached to the activities; the teachers will provide the weekly schedules of work through the summer half terms, then families can then do as much of the weekly work selection as their circumstances allow.

Teachers will also message their classes weekly on the website to touch base with the children.

Towards the end of the Easter holiday period, once the learning packs are ready to go, we will be asking for volunteers to help deliver them around their area as part of their daily walk. This will take some organisation, including GDPR matters, and we will message you with further details about this later in the holiday. We also appreciate that certain families live further afield and may not be on anyone’s exercise route. We will contact those people to make other arrangements.

Best wishes to you and your loved ones for a healthy, happy holiday period.

Darren Stanley