Important communication for parents and carers.
13th January 2021
Dear Parents/Carers
Some great news - Ms McGeorge has welcomed a beautiful baby boy into her family at the weekend. Congratulations to them all and we look forward to a time we can meet him.
We are now in week 2 of the January lockdown and, although clearly there is no substitute for learning in a classroom with a teacher, the staff here in school are working hard to ensure good quality videos for the home learning. The dialogue between teacher and child will ensure the most effective progress and in turn provide encouragement to continue with remote learning. In the Early Years department we are using Tapestry, Years 1 to 5 ClassDojo and Year 6 TEAMS so it is vital that all children are posting work and receiving feedback from the staff.
As a leadership team we have done alot of reading around the advantages of live and recorded lessons and as an Academy will be providing teaching videos of lessons so that these can be accessed at parents convenience and can be paused and re-watched as necessary. Year 6 are currently doing some live elements as these pupils have been taught in school how to use TEAMs – this will continue to develop further. We are exploring a way to do live check ins for other year groups and will be in touch about this in the near future.
We fully appreciate that managing the online learning is a challenge for parents and as it remains priority that these lessons are completed, with work uploaded, we will not be posting extra homework activities but will instead be posting learning tasks on the website for any parents who require further homework.
As a school we have a number of places for the pupils that meet the government criteria but these places have to be limited to ensure safety of all and comply with our risk assessment so we would ask that children of critical workers should NOT attend school if it is possible for them to remain at home as it is safer for all concerned.
The Stay at Home message from the government is very clear and is what will lead to a reduction in the transmission of the virus and enable schools to open fully.
This situation is not easy for any member of our school community – children, parents or staff but I can assure you that we are working tirelessly to provide good quality on line learning while at the same time delivering face to face learning for the eligible pupils, to ensuring all those pupils that need one will get a device/dongle, providing food hampers to those familes that are in need and calling all pupils at least once a week. As a staff we are totally committed to your children and are grateful of your support in this challenging time.
Regards
Mrs Crew
Oasis Leadership