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Distance Learning

Wednesday 18 March 2020

Dear Parents,

Today, your child has brought an ‘Activity Pack’ home with them. This pack has been prepared by the school for your child. It should be used if:

  • Your child is in self-isolation and well enough to
  • The school has to close (which we will only do in line with Department for Education guidance).

The Activity Pack includes:

  • Assessment materials
  • Handwriting practise sheets
  • Number skills practise sheets
  • Key spelling word list
  • PowerMaths Book

Distance Learning:

Moving forward, we are keen to establish routines and resources to support Distance Learning should our school close and/or for those families who exhaust the initial ‘Activity Pack’. We have four elements to our school’s approach to Distance Learning that aim to help families support their child’s ongoing education:

 

1)  The HVA Curriculum:

Our website curriculum page (https://haywoodvillageacademy.clf.uk/curriculum/) details the school’s subject frameworks. These set out the curriculum content for each year group (excluding Pre-school and Reception). The Pre-school and Reception curriculum is set out within the Early Years Foundation Stage Handbook linked on the same page (Section 6 is the expectations for the end of Reception). Please use these to support your awareness of the expectations of what we would be teaching if we were open all year round. You are more than welcome to use these to create and search for resources online to develop pupils’ understanding or even to help support conversations.

2)  Key Teaching & Learning resources:

We have the following link to a Sharepoint available for our school: https://tinyurl.com/wx62oka

Once finalised, you will find year group folders with key learning for year groups set up. We anticipate that within these folders there will be:

  • Weekly ‘Key Lessons’ with a teacher input and instruction (this may be in the form of a written description of a lesson in Word, a PowerPoint presentation or a video). We expect these Key Lessons to be completed across the
  • Weekly ‘Mini Challenges’. These additional ‘Mini Challenges’ are for children to try and complete across the

We would recommend that where possible families download the free Microsoft Word and PowerPoint apps to support accessing the materials placed on the Sharepoint.

3)  E-Learning Resources:

On each class webpage there are a selection of links to recommended websites that can support education. We are aware that more are becoming available or being ‘found’. You are welcome to share these sites with us via enquiries or the class email addresses below and we will re-share these over time.

Further to this, we have a subscription that we can share with all our children. Discovery Education’s Espresso is a school paid online resource. They have shared a unique and private login for our families at this time to enable home access. https://www.discoveryeducation.co.uk/

Click ‘Login’ (top right), Select ‘Espresso’ Username: student71022

Password: haywood

This resource will provide a wealth of learning opportunities. We may well also direct you to resources via the ‘Key Teaching & Learning resources’ Sharepoint. However, we would recommend two areas specifically once you login: First, click on the ‘subjects’ and explore the practise games and videos. Second, another area, which is seemingly hidden beneath the title of the subject, is ‘lesson routes’.

4)  Contact with teachers:

We will identify staff who will contact families on a regular basis. This will be telephone calls. Please anticipate these being from withheld numbers from the teaching team’s own phones. The purpose of the calls is to check in with:

  • How the children are in themselves (health and wellbeing). It would be great if the staff could get to speak to the
  • If there are any ways in which we can support the family during this
  • Answer any questions related to accessing and supporting learning. Again, it would be great if the staff get to speak to the children to support with

We have also set up class email accounts for you to communicate with your teaching team. We are aware that some of you may have the direct email for a class teacher. However, we would like you to use these new email addresses as they are shared inboxes, which various staff members will be able to access and respond to as necessary. These are:

Preschool: [email protected] or [email protected] Reception: [email protected] or [email protected] Year 1: [email protected] or [email protected] Year 2: [email protected] or [email protected]

Year 3: [email protected] or [email protected] Year 4: [email protected]

What if you cannot access the internet?

We recognise that some families (approximately 10% of pupils) will not have access to the internet to engage with some of the Distance Learning we have offered. Therefore, we intend, through the ‘Contact with teachers’, to help identify ways in which we can help.

Thank you for your continued support of your child and of our school.

Yours faithfully

Craig Jones
Principal