Dear Parents and Carers,
Here we are at the end of week 2! Once again, thank you to everyone for working so hard and sharing with us your news and work. It was great to see some of our families yesterday when Mrs Hayes and I delivered the ‘food hampers’. We are really grateful to Tesco for supplying the bags for the ‘hampers’ and to St Marys Church Yapton for helping to top up the ‘hampers’ with additional food. Our teachers this week have begun to make phone calls to families in their class to offer support with ‘home learning’.
Home Learning
We realise that learning at home is very different to learning at school. Please remember not to put too much pressure on yourselves to turn your home into a school. We are really appreciative of the support you have given your children so far. Following your feedback and reflections from teachers on home learning through Google Classroom, we would like to share with the our updated arrangements as we move forward:
- Learning will be available at 8am each day
- Morning timetables (Monday-Thursday) will remain consistent and focus on English and Maths (some parents wanted to be able to plan their day)
- Afternoon learning will consist of the foundation subjects
- Friday’s learning will be focus on R.E. and more creative opportunities (some parents had noticed their children were getting tired at the end of the week)
- The learning will be organised in weekly folders which will make it easier to you to find
- Deadlines have been removed, so if the work is returned later in the afternoon it will not be shown as ‘late’ and teachers will still give feedback
- We would like to encourage families to send in work regularly rather than just at the end of the week
- If work has not been sent back by Friday, teachers will not be able to give feedback over the weekend
- If you are struggling to return photos of your children’s learning through Google Classroom, please use your child’s email address instead (e.g. arundel@yaptonschool.org, camber@yaptonschool.org, etc)
- On a Monday, there will be a link to a YouTube video which the teachers have made to launch the learning for each new week
- There will also be a link for an afternoon story time at the end of each day where the teachers will be reading a story the children. (These stories will be available from 2:30pm every day.)
Places in school
We have worked very hard to accommodate every request for a place in school. Some classes are now full (in line with Union guidance) and as a school we are very close to capacity. A waiting is list has been organised so if circumstances change, please let us know but there is no guarantee of a place at the moment.
Free School Meals
You may be aware the government has changed their recommendation for the provision of Free School Meals during this lockdown. From next week, we are moving from food hampers to online vouchers. These will be arranged to be sent to the families entitled to Free School Meals who are not in school. This is because those children who are in school have the opportunity to receive a hot meal.
INSET Day
Friday 12th February will need remain as an INSET day as planned. We cannot change this date due to scheduled essential maintenance work with the school.
Tuesday Chat
For the rest of this half term, Mr Hughes and I will continue to host the Tuesday Chat. This will be via Zoom. It was great to see and chat to some of our parents who joined us this week. We hope that they found it helpful. The details for the meetings are in the parent mail sent to you. Please be patient if you are waiting in the waiting room whilst another parent is chatting with us.
The meeting will be open from 4:30pm until 6:00pm
Have a great weekend and don’t forget to use the office2@yaptonschool.orgemail address to let us know about anything that you need help with. It is always nice to receive positive feedback or any snippets of good news!
Take care
Kim Huggett