Home Learning Letter

Wednesday 18^th March

Dear parent and carers,

Firstly, I would like to thank you all for kindness this week.  Your patience and overwhelming support is so appreciated, during what is for all of us a very challenging situation. 

Behind the scenes we have been working hard to organise ‘Home Learning’.   Our intention was to ensure that in the event of a school closure we would be able to provide each family with a ‘hardcopy’ resource to allow the children to continue their learning, whilst social distancing measures and self-isolation take place.  However, with diminishing numbers of pupils and the imminent announcement that schools will close, we have not been able to achieve this in its entirety, but everything will be online by Friday.

Nevertheless, this evening your son/daughter has brought home a learning grid; this grid contains a range of activities to be completed each day from Monday 23^rd March.   These activities can be completed in their homework book, which should already be at home.  Each week (excluding the Easter Holiday), teachers will continue to upload a weekly grid until we return to school https://www.st-michaels-junior.kent.sch.uk/Home-Learning/.  We have also sent home National Curriculum expectation documentation.

In addition, the school website lists a range of web addresses you can visit with your children.  Many of these are generic sites, but teachers have also added relevant sites to the year group tabs on the COVID19 home learning page (see above link).

A year group Knowledge Organiser, relating to NEXT terms topic is also on the website- this will allow the children…

• To quiz themselves in lessons and at home
• To practise spelling key vocabulary
• To further research people, events and processes most relevant to the unit
• As a way to trigger memories from lessons about key information

We care very much about you and your children so we have decided that teachers will communicate with their pupils using Seesaw.  This will be in the form of a daily messages or a personal video.  We think this will encourage the children to complete their work, but also provide a level of continuity for everyone!  However, as you will appreciate these messages may stop if a teacher becomes poorly.

Senior leaders will continue, where possible, to update Facebook, the app and website – we will do our upmost to answer questions and support you at home.  This is an unprecedented situation, but I know we will continue to work together to get through this!!!!!

Please complete as much of the work as you can during the period of the school closure.

Please stay safe and well. We wish you a speedy recovery if you become poorly. Don’t panic, keep smiling and if you need us then please post a message on the schools Facebook page.

Take care of yourselves and see you once we are all back at school

Yours truly,

Sue Heather