Newsletter extract - The full newsletter is available at the link at the bottom of the page.

12 January 2021

Dear Parents & Carers,

It has been quite a whirlwind fortnight and guidance to schools continues to be published, which we are trying to keep up to date with. We are pleased that in the first national lockdown we were able to develop our use of Google Classroom, Tapestry, etc. to make sure that we could help children to have a positive home learning experience. Nationally the expectations for all schools to do this have been strengthened and this has resulted in so much demand to services like Tapestry and Teachers2Parents that systems have crashed and not coped with the demand. This seems to be being ironed out, but do get in touch with us if there continue to be problems. At Shire Oak we are conscious that each family is in a different situation. Some families prefer work they can get alongside their children with. Some want the work to be totally independent. Some would like a full school day, others prefer to be able to follow their own learning interests for part of the day. The most important things to do are daily reading (and phonics in the younger years). After that, please prioritise the maths and English. As the children have already had so much time off school last year there is more new content being taught than revision and consolidation this time and the maths, particularly, builds day on day. If you feel you are ‘getting behind’ with White Rose maths, for example, it might be better to watch the input, set a time limit (45 minutes to an hour for older children) and do a couple of questions from each day, than spend all week ploughing through all of Monday’s questions. This will make it easier to keep up with the class as a whole and access class learning when we return. Vulnerable children and the children of critical workers who are in school will be accessing the remote learning set by their teacher, so they still need to do school work on the days they are at home to help them have appropriate work on the days they are in school.

Jane Astrid Devane

If you would like to suggest some useful resources please get in touch by emailing homelearning@shireoak.online