Home learning (25 March 2020)

Wednesday 25 March 2020

Once again, we’re going to start this update with a big thank you to you, the parents and carers. We know this is tough for you. One of our own teachers with two children has commented that finding the balance between supporting her own children whilst working from home is tough. Remember, though, you’re doing a great job in tough times.

In today’s update, we’ve a top tip. There’ll be another one tomorrow and one more on Friday…

Tip number 1: supporting more than one child at home

If you’ve got more than one child at home, you might like to access the home learning tasks using different devices – perhaps one on a computer at home, and one on a mobile phone. (Like most websites these days, ours is set up so that looking at it on a smartphone works, with no squashed text or other content.) This will mean the children can settle to their learning at roughly the same time.

Another solution to support home learning with more than one child is to balance things out: quiet reading for one, and the home learning task for another.

And a third way might be for both children to have a go at the same task. This won’t always work, but often will, maybe with a tweak or two. For example, if a younger child is set a phonics challenge (such as spotting things around the house that begin with a ‘ch’ sound, like ‘chip’), the older child could be set the same task, but with longer words, or words that have ‘sh’ somewhere other than at the start (like ‘kitchen’).

If you’ve established a routine that includes PE with Joe Wicks at 9am, that could also give you time to check out the tasks for each of your children and think about how to be flexible, making them work for you and your children.

We’re going to end the update with another thank you, and that’s to you again. On behalf of all the teachers, the Heads of School and me, we’re saying thank you for the great feedback we’ve been getting for the communications. In these socially distanced times, we’re really happy to hear what we’re doing remotely is helping in some way.