Seesaw in Primary

Seesaw in the Pre-Prep (Nursery and Reception)

For those of you with children in the Early Years, you will no doubt want to know what your children have been learning. At this very young age, children are less able to share their learning with their parents as their language skills are still developing.

The EYFS teachers regularly use Seesaw to take photographic evidence of the children’s learning and play. It is primarily a digital portfolio, with opportunities for the class teacher to share key moments across the week with parents. Parents are encouraged to add comments and share these with their children, as it makes them feel proud of their achievements.

Seesaw in Prep (Key Stage One)

As children move into Year One, there is a shift towards a more reflective process. Therefore you will probably notice that what you see in Seesaw changes quite significantly when your child moves from Reception into Y1.

Students start to take on ownership of their own Seesaw journal in order to show what they have been learning and, crucially, how they learned. The students in Key Stage One learn how to post photos of their work and then use the Seesaw multimodal tools, such as the video, audio and typing tools to explain their learning. The process of reflection is an important skill and Seesaw is a great platform for this.

In addition to students posting examples of their work, teachers will also post a few photos each fortnight so that parents can see additional examples of the learning that has taken place. 

Seesaw in Prep (Key Stage Two, Years 3 - 5)

As the children move into Key Stage Two, the reflective process is developed even further. Now, the teachers will be working with the students to consider in detail what and how they have learnt, what they are most proud of and how they could improve further. They also focus on the skills of metacognition (learning about learning) which encourages students to think about the skills and approaches they used to complete the piece of work. The students learn to think about whether they have demonstrated the attributes of a “good learner”.

To do this, they might consider questions such as:

• Was this task asking for subject knowledge I remember?

• What strategies did I deploy if I got stuck?

• Did I make links with some other learning that helped me here?

• How did I feel about this learning?

These student reflections will be completed at the end of a key piece of work, such as an edited piece of writing, a topic or a unit of work.

In addition to these reflective posts, the class teacher will add a few photos of the whole class which act as a ‘window into the classroom’ and allow parents to see the fun activities that the students participate in. These teacher posts will be fortnightly. Students in Year 5 will also have the opportunity to share inquiry-based homework tasks via their Seesaw journal.

To access Seesaw find the right app for your device on this page or just visit app.seesaw.me in any browser.

If you manage to log in as a Family Member but cannot see the Journal for your child in the Journals tab, please contact your child’s class teacher who can resend the invitation to connect to your child’s Journal.

If your child needs to sign into Seesaw at home as a student (for example, to do some homework that has been sent via Seesaw or to access the Nursery talk activities) then they will need to use their Seesaw Home Learning Code.

Class teachers will send out the students' Seesaw Home Learning Codes if they want the students to use Seesaw to access homework at home. Please note that not all teachers will be using Seesaw to send homework.

If your child does not have any homework on Seesaw (or a Nursery Talk Activity), then there is no other reason to sign into Seesaw at home as a student.