Dear Parents/Carers,

We will continue to support you as best as we can by suggesting home learning activities. Please remember that these are ‘suggested’ activities to provide your child with a structure for learning over the coming weeks. We of course appreciate the complexities of all home situations at this uncertain time and are thankful for all that you are able to do. Please do whatever amount of learning that works best for you and your family. The focus should be enjoying quality family time. We hope that your children enjoy using these resources, but there is no expectation that they complete everything we send home to you. Please do get in touch if you have any questions. 

The Department for Education (DfE) have recently released guidance on supporting children with home learning, which is particularly relevant for parents. 

Please click on relevant link:

Advice for parents and carers of children who have not yet started school

Guidance on helping primary school aged children learn at home

Guidance on helping children with special educational needs and disabilities learn at home

Home Learning

In partnership with Wimborne Academy Trust, we are constantly reviewing the home learning materials, which you can find on the website. Thank you for your positive feedback about this and for supporting the children at home with their learning. I’m sure it is not always easy to keep our young children motivated and engaged under these circumstances, so please remember that these are only ‘suggested’ activities to provide the children with a structure for learning over the coming weeks. As teachers, we are new to this ‘home learning’ too, and we are trying to provide you with as much guidance and variety as possible. There is no expectation that you engage with everything that we are sending out to you. This is especially so for the Bitesize materials, as the quantity of daily resources for Maths and English can be a great deal. Please do not feel you need to work through all of the activities. Ultimately, the most important thing is that you are able to make the most of this precious time with your children.

 

As you will be aware by now, Bitesize will often include a paper resource within their daily provision. This poses a slight problem because Bitesize’s daily content is also only made available to schools on the actual day, which means we cannot print paper resources ahead of time for those who do not have access to a computer. We have reflected on this and do not feel it is appropriate to request that parents make unnecessary journeys to and from school on a daily basis in order to collect this learning. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that we have a number of children and staff members in school so we need to be mindful of reducing traffic in and out of the school building for everyone’s safety. We now ask that, when it is not practical to transfer information into your child’s home learning book, you choose the ‘offline option’, which we have now included on your child’s home learning grid and which we have tried to link to the Bitesize learning for that day.

Home learning packs will still be available for those who do not have access to a computer but this will not contain printable Bitesize activities. Please can I reiterate that we want to discourage any unnecessary journeys to school and are endeavouring to keep paper resources to a minimum so we can only provide a limited number of home learning packs for those who have made the school aware that they do not have computer access. We apologise if this poses any inconvenience.

Finally, thank you to those of you that have shared photographs of home learning that your children feel particularly proud about. Being able to see the children and hear about their learning have really lifted the spirits of staff during this difficult time. In the near future, we hope to set up a base email for children so that they can share photographs with all the teachers in their base. Although we cannot upload all photos, we intend to share some examples of home learning or special achievements on our Website under Home Learning > Your Pictures and News. Please could we ask that when you email photographs, you add a note stating whether you give permission for this to be shared on our website?

Please do let us know if you need support with anything during this period of closure and we will do our best to help. Thank you for your continued support with home learning.