First day of Remote Learning
Dear Parents and Carers
It was so lovely to see all the children ready to learn and talking to their teachers on zoom this morning! The teachers can't wait to read their stories to them at 2.45pm. Remember to log back in.
As you can imagine, there are a lot of things to organise at the moment. We have 9 Critical Care bubbles running with 2 adults in each. We are also teaching children at home too. We are reviewing a few things to make learning links clearer for children, including learning for the day. We are also still awaiting our tapestry logins for Year 1 and 2, for individual learning to be sent back to school. Until we have this, please use the Year Group emails. When your child logs in, please can it be their name (we had some funny named children on some zooms today!), and mute your microphone. The teachers will let you know when you can unmute.
We will be having a Celebration Assembly on Friday, and I have asked the teachers to share one child from each Year Group's learning-this includes children attending school and at home. Teachers will also continue to award learning stars for good learning and we will send out learning certificates to home. I will send the link to the zoom before Friday.
Thank you to the majority of parents for helping try to make school safe for our staff and children by only sending your children in, when there is no other option for you at home. This is helping to greatly reduce numbers and risk of spreading coronavirus. The new strain is said to be 50%-70% more transmissible. It is also affecting children. This is a great worry to us all, and I know you will not put our staff members and children at greater risk if you had someone at home who can help your child. I would like to reassure parents who have sent their children to us, that we have a stringent risk assessment and procedures in place to be as safe as we can be.
We are signing out electronic devices if you need them to help at home. We have not been given any devices from the government, so they are our school laptops that we use in class. The availability of devices are limited, and will be given to families who are in the greatest need for them. We also have a limited number of data cards, if your device runs on data. These will be given out to families who email to request them and are in the greatest need for them. If you feel that either of these will be useful, please contact Mrs Palmer.
For children who are attending school during lockdown, please do not bring in anything from home other than outside clothing (coat, hat gloves), a water bottle and trainers if not worn to school. Lunches will be provided, but if you would like to provide one for your child, you can. Please only attend on the days requested, and if your circumstances change (eg you are furloughed), please change your child's attendance at school to reflect this. On the days your child is not attending, please complete the learning for the day at home in their blended learning book. These stay home until the children come back to school at the end of lockdown.
If you require writing pencils/pens please let us know and they can be picked up at the office. We will not be sending any reading books home during this time and book bags should not be brought to school. There are online links for parents who need reading material on our website.
We provided a pack of learning for this week. The majority of learning will be able to be done straight from the computer into the blended learning book, with little being printed out. The current advice for all is 'Stay at Home'. Following this advice we will not be providing learning packs for all every week, as this would encourage everybody to leave their homes. Please contact Year leaders if you are unable to access the learning and we will look at how we can help individuals.
Our brilliant Yoga Teacher, Emma Whewell, is currently videoing some Yoga sessions and Yoga hints and tips. As soon as these are ready to go on our site, we will put them on. We will all be very flexible the next time we meet!
We hope you are all keeping well. Thank you so much for your kind words of support and emails this week. They have really cheered us all up. As I have said in the past, we had very good plans for this. But until a plan becomes a reality, we really couldn't see how it would run. We will continue to make tweaks and changes as we go along and remember we are always on the end of the telephone, or email. If you can give us a couple of weeks to find our feet, we will be very grateful. All staff are working very hard to make this work for all our children and families and appreciate the enormous stress this has put everybody under. We will get through this. Hopefully the vaccine will be forthcoming and we can see you sooner rather than later. We miss you all very much.
Best wishes
Mrs Riches
