HOME SCHOOL LEARNING- Pupils Online Learning
I write to you again, in these very uncertain and challenging times for us all. Our thoughts go out to all members of our school community and beyond who are being affected by this situation that we now find ourselves in. It is with great sadness that we need to take a different approach for the foreseeable future as the direct day to day contact with our pupils, your children is the part of the job we enjoy the most. However, following the announcement from Kirsty Williams on Wednesday, informing us that all schools will be closed for an indefinite period, please find below information about how we will be continuing to provide education for your child/ren.
Obviously we will all be working under very different circumstances form how we have previously operated and with all schools closed, on-line and distance learning by all pupils in the UK will put an enormous strain on the internet infrastructure. This may result in infrastructure crashes, slower download speeds and intermittent connectivity, but, hopefully, these issues will be resolved and not impact too much on your child’s access to learning.
Even though the school will be closed, teachers will continue to work either in school or from home preparing work for your child and providing marking and feedback for the work that they do.
Home school learning
Work will be provided weekly to all pupils. This will be in the form of a 4x4 grid with 16 age appropriate activities per week for them to complete. Activities will be across the whole curriculum and your child can decide which activities they wish to complete every day. Obviously your child does not work continuously in school throughout the day as there are opportunities for play and breaks. Please ensure your child still has opportunities for a break from their work.
The work will be posted on Parentmail, the child’s HWB class page and also the school website.
In addition to this pupils will be provided with a list of websites, and teachers will direct pupils to different websites to help understand, enhance or consolidate learning.
Literacy and numeracy tasks will be differentiated at 3 levels and your child will choose which level they are comfortable to work on. Pupils may wish to access the tasks at more than one level and are free to do so.
Where parents may have difficulty with internet accessible devises hard packs will be available to collect from the school foyer from 9.00am to 11.00am every Monday morning. This may be subject to change depending on need or situation.
HWB Learning platform
Please see step by step guide to show how to access this learning platform, which can be found under the "Home School Learning" page under the "Children's" tab on the home page of our website. You will need your child’s username and password already supplied by the class teacher.
Pupils will need to join their HWB class by clicking the link e-mailed to their HWB e-mail address sent yesterday 19/3/2020. Reception and Nursery childrens HWB email addresses are being sent out to you and will be with you by Sunday. Please bear with us while we undertake this lengthy administration task.
Homework grids, discussions and announcements will be posted on their class pages.
Where children are able to record work on-line we would like them to use the Just2easy program on the HWB homepage. Teachers will view their work and provide feedback directly to the child on their work.
Photographs can be uploaded to this program also, so if a child produces work in a different medium and takes a photo of this, it can be uploaded using the camera tool.
Teachers HWB e-mail addresses are also being shared. If you wish to contact staff if you have questions regarding the work or being able to access the learning, then please do so via these accounts. Teachers have daily designated times, 11.00am-12.00pm and 2.30pm-3.30pm to respond to e-mails. Staff will not be responding outside of these times as they have other duties to attend to.
If you have a technical issue can you please cc Mrs Hancock as well as she will be providing technical support.
Please be aware that staff may become ill or have family members that require nursing and during these time may not be available for contact. Also there is a very strong possibility that staff may be re-deployed to other front line services and this too will impact on their availability. Where a member of staff is absent the other teacher in their year group will post the work to be completed but will not be able to mark the completed work. Under normal circumstances with staff absence, we would employ a supply teacher but this facility is not available under these circumstances.
Please bear with us as we operate this different approach. There are bound to be glitches and we will work hard to address them as quickly as possible.
Kind regards
Mr H Roberts