Dear Parents,

Thank you so much for bearing with us today. We have tried our best to respond to the announcement last night as quickly as we can.

From tomorrow your child will be receiving daily home learning using the Seesaw App. Your child’s class teacher will be posting lessons, videos, activities etc for your child to complete at home. They will be monitoring the work that your child completes, giving feedback and will be there to answer queries and offer support. We will try our best to make these tasks as independent as possible, but obviously the younger your child is, the more difficult this is.

If you are struggling to access Seesaw, please email your child’s teacher or asf.office@ttlt.org.uk and we can resend out their login details. We also have a few tablets which you can loan if you are struggling with the technology.

We will also try to run whole school assemblies when we are able to – more information to follow.

If your child is a keyworker, you should have completed the keyworker form, available on our website and also on facebook. Your child will complete the same work under the supervision of school staff, but will not be taught by their class teacher (as obviously they are busy online!). Please consider others – we are now full in some bubbles and will be turning keyworkers away. This is so unfair. Keyworker provision is there to allow keyworkers to do a vital job to get us through the pandemic, and not for children to have more structure, see their friends or because they are ‘entitled’.

The feedback from parents whose children had to self-isolate last term was that Seesaw was far more child friendly, and that the children were far more willing to complete their learning at home when their class teacher was talking to them! I hope that remains the case.  Please try to talk to your children about the activities as being ‘learning at home’ rather than ‘homework’, and do remind them that their class teacher is waiting to see what they have been doing.

On a personal note, I am sure that lots of you may be feeling overwhelmed by everything that’s happening, yet again. The prospect of your children being at home for such a lengthy period of time is daunting, as is the thought of being responsible for their education. For what it’s worth, this is my perspective on it all as a Headteacher.

Things to remember:

• This is still an emergency situation impacting on the whole world. You haven’t chosen to home school – that is a life choice. You could say that we are trying to learn from home. The lessons we learnt from last time round have helped us as a school to improve our offer, and we hope that this will make things slightly easier for you.
• You always have been your child’s primary educator. If you decide that your child isn’t engaging, don’t persist. Do something else. If you end up baking, watching TV, or playing in the garden then that is your choice. There is nothing to stress or feel guilty about.
• We don’t know quite what to do either! Even though we’ve been through this once, it’s still daunting.

If you are worried your child will ‘fall behind’, try not to. The term that they have been with us has shown that each child is individual, and that their attainment and progress has been affected. However, the last term has also shown us that they will still progress and continue to learn.

If you’re not doing all the work we have prepared for your children, and ‘all’ they’re doing is building Lego, cooking and playing, remember that all of that is valuable learning.  If you have three different lots of work with 3 kids of different ages, that’s hard. If they’re old enough, try to get them to do little bits independently – we’ve really tried to make work independent where possible. Otherwise try to do something they can all engage with, reading a story together, some free writing, baking etc.

We don’t have an expectation of a ‘minimum’ amount of work. It would be great if your child engages in all of it, but it is not worth your health and sanity. Your children’s teacher will post encouraging videos and send feedback to your child. Your child can send voice messages or video messages to their teacher. We will try our best to motivate them!

We’ll also add points to their online sticker chart (J2Stars). That nearly always works!

Above all, stay safe. We are missing the children and are so looking forward to having them all back with us as soon as it’s possible.

With my warmest wishes,

Liz Allbutt

Headteacher