We closed school for all pupils because of the icy conditions and forecast for freezing temperatures throughout the day. If you’ve had to travel, we hope you managed to do so safely.
Our daily Zoom sessions
These are proving popular and are well-attended. They’re a chance to review and reflect on the learning that’s been happening, and there should be time for your child to check on how they’ve carried out any task. If your child joins a Zoom, please make sure it’s in the living room or kitchen or some other appropriate space – not a bedroom. On page 10 of our Home Learning guide, you’ll find a few other points for you and your child to follow, too.
Tailoring the home learning for your child
Our assessments show that the vast majority of children didn’t fall behind too much in the Spring/Summer lockdown, and they were able to make rapid progress – our December assessments were really encouraging.
Where children did fall behind, two areas stand out for the majority of our pupils – and these are actually fairly straightforward to support at home:
- times tables – that’s why we’re encouraging Times Tables Rock Stars so much right now, and this page on our website might help, too
- spellings – during this period, we’re continuing to provide a list of spellings to learn and from 5pm today, you’ll be able to find that list alongside one of the recorded lessons for the week; this means you can be building in daily practice sessions where your child should practise their spellings, and then you could test them on a Friday just like they’d be tested at school
Contact your child’s teacher for specific areas to work on as well as times tables and spellings. The teacher will guide you to which of the seven daily sessions are most important to do.
Fitting in all the home learning sessions
Ideally, we’d like every child learning from home to do all seven daily lessons. As we said on Wednesday, that’s a lot, and so you might need to be realistic about how many you can do – five would be good as a general rule. Our advice is to do at least one from each ‘colour’ on page 2 of the Home Learning Guide. This means doing just one of the two Reading sessions, and just one of the two Writing sessions – but do the full series rather than chop and change each day. (Reading and Writing are subjects are subjects where your child won’t miss out: a lot of the learning is practice, and where there’s new learning, it’ll be returned to again in the school year or future years – this is what’s sometimes called a ‘spiral curriculum’.)
As well as doing just four or five of the sessions, there are other ways to fit things into the day if you find your child is taking a long time:
- if the teacher gives a task like writing out several sentences/answers, limit the number of sentences/answers to just the first one or two
- your child could say the answers out loud rather than write them down
- choose to end the session after about 30 minutes, even if it’s not yet finished, so you’ve got time for the other sessions planned
- think about starting the day earlier, like at 8am, if this helps fit things into a routine that works well for the family
We’d love to hear other ways you’re making home learning work – we’ll share any top tips with others.
It’s been a busy week, but we’ve made it to Friday! This lockdown situation is stressful for us all but we’re confident you’re doing a good job. We hope you have a happy and healthy weekend.