SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND REMOTE EDUCATION

The following extracts from the latest government guidance for schools will give parents a context for the curriculum children are experiencing in school at the moment. Schools should:

Develop remote education so that it is integrated into school curriculum planning. Remote education may need to be an essential component in the delivery of the school curriculum for some pupils, alongside classroom teaching, or in the case of a local lock down. [Schools should] use a curriculum sequence that allows access to high-quality online and offline resources and teaching videos and that is linked to the school’s curriculum expectations. [Schools should] select the online tools that will be consistently used across the school in order to allow interaction, assessment and feedback and make sure staff are trained in their use.

Now we are into the swing of our new version of school life, we wanted to share some more details about curriculum matters and how we are planning and teaching English and maths.

Provision this term, according to the Government guidance referenced above, requires us to prepare for seamless movement between face to face learning at school and home learning in the event that a child/family needs to self-isolate whilst awaiting testing or if a bubble or the school is temporarily shut down.

As such teachers are using transferable online resources as a framework for planning and teaching in school.

In English we will be following the curriculum progression of Oak National Academy lessons and in maths we will be following the schemes of work from White Rose Maths (however, this was already the case prior to COVID-19).

The online resources can then seamlessly be used and accessed by children via SeeSaw if they are not in school and as such limit any further gaps in education. The videos and resources produced by both Oak and White Rose may be used in class to share resources or to listen to a focused text but the teachers are teaching the lesson content – in school, the videos are used as a planning tool or resource - not as a ‘virtual teacher’.

Ensuring that our curriculum can work in school and at home has required a considerable amount of adaptation and planning -it is working well so far. However, we will continue to refine and review our curriculum as the COVID-19 situations evolves.

If you have any questions about curriculum content, please don’t hesitate to contact us. It is extremely important that you understand what we are trying to achieve, and how, so that we can work effectively together to get the best possible outcomes for the pupils over these coming months.

SEESAW APP – CHATTING?!

We can see that some parents have already downloaded SeeSaw (see attachment below if you haven't yet) and started to respond to the work set by teachers with their children . When using SeeSaw, please ask your child to only post work and messages linked to the learning tasks set by the teachers. We have seen that some very enthusiastic pupils have been sending multiple messages to teachers on a range of subjects not at all linked to their work! SeeSaw is designed to be used for pupils to submit work and receive feedback – not as a ‘chat’ app! Please also encourage your children to send their work and comments in one post, not multiple posts. Many thanks for your support with this.

Please note:

• SeeSaw should only be used for submitting work set by the teachers and for asking questions specifically about the work set on SeeSaw.
• Class emails should be used for questions about any other aspect of school life