Dear Parent/Carer,

 

Hope this letter finds you and your families all safe and well.

 

It is essential that we all work together to find a way to ensure our children continue to access education and make progress as much as possible, especially as the lockdown has now been extended. We continue to follow our curriculum plans and to deliver high quality learning opportunities for our children as far as it is possible. This has been working exceptionally well for those children accessing our remote learning and curriculum daily on our class Seesaw platforms. We are however aware that for those children who are not engaging, they are not following our Spring Term curriculum and will be falling further behind. This is of course of great concern to us.

 

Unfortunately we cannot offer a model that meets everyone’s personal needs, wants, work patterns and child temperaments fully and I urge you all to be flexible and to contact your child’s class teacher to discuss your personal circumstances if you are having difficulties. Our teachers are approachable and caring people who will be more than happy to make allowances or work with you when things are difficult at home. They are also extremely humbled when you express your thanks and gratitude in emails, messages and through phone calls; thank you to everyone who has taken the time to do this.

 

Through our class Seesaw platforms we are trying to make the learning interactive between the hours of 9am and 3pm to reduce pressure on parents. Certainly, for children who are in years 2-6 there should be no need for most parents to sit one to one with their child whilst they complete their learning. Teachers are adding voice over messages and video teaching clips to Seesaw as part of their lesson delivery, as well as publishing links to some amazing resources on the internet.

 

Teachers and TAs are responsive to children during the school day and are available to answer any problems they have. If your child has any difficulty understanding or accessing the activities, they can message their teachers on Seesaw. Staff will respond to them as soon as they can.

 

As remote learning is still a fairly new way of teaching, it is still a work in progress and we are continually looking to improve it as we go along, so please be patient and work together with us.

 

 

 

Microsoft Teams Trial

One of the areas we would like to improve in is increasing the ‘connectivity’ of our remote learning offer. During remote learning on Seesaw we would like to offer the opportunity for pupils to meet remotely on ‘Microsoft Teams’ with their teacher and their class peers. We hope that this will support our children’s mental health and enable them to continue to feel connected to their school, class and peers.

 

We are going to start this trial with Mrs Anderson’s class (Year 6) on Friday.

 

All Mrs Anderson’s children will be invited to a live ‘Teams’ meeting online.

They will be able to join the meeting through a link posted on their Seesaw platform.

 

Mrs Anderson will be presenting the meeting and holding a live ‘Celebration Assembly’ for the children. They will be able to see and hear each other and take part in the usual weekly school celebrations such as ‘Super Student’ and ‘Hot Choc Friday’.

 

All live sessions are recorded by the teaching staff for safeguarding reasons and there will be clear ‘expectations and code of conduct’ shared with pupils and parents.

 

We hope the children are really going to enjoy this experience and if successful we will look to roll these out across the school, to take place at least weekly.

 

Thank you for your continued support. Please stay safe.