Dear WSR family,

This is our first newsletter for the new Term, and a great opportunity for us to reflect. The last Term was one of the most unconventional starts to a school year that any of us have ever had! Thank you for supporting us with following the regulations put in place, and helping to ensure that your child was continuing with their learning in the best way for you and your family.

A new year always give us time to reflect. At the end of this week, you will receive your child’s end of Term 1 report which will give you an indication of their progress so far. It is important that you make an appointment to meet with your child’s teacher for the PCM on Thursday 14^th January, so that you can discuss the targets for learning for your child for this term. It would be great if your child could make two-three clear targets for each of their subjects with specific things they can do to make improvements in their progress.

As a school, we have reflected on what we can do this Term to support your child, and we have decided that we need to focus more on developing the children’s oral skills. Through a high quality oracy education, students learn through talk and to talk. This is when they develop and deepen their subject knowledge and understanding through talk in the classroom, which has been planned, designed, modelled, scaffolded and structured to enable them to learn the skills needed to talk effectively. The deliberate, explicit and systematic teaching of oracy throughout the curriculum will support children to make progress in all of their subjects. One way you can support this, is to ask them about their weekly oracy homework. Please try to encourage your child to share with you the topic of the week (it will also be available in this newsletter), and have a conversation with them about it. Encourage them to use full sentences, to think carefully about their vocabulary choices and also about their delivery.

Have a safe January,