Weekly Head Teacher Update

Dear Parents/carers,

I hope you are all keeping safe and well during this time.

Thank you for all your comments about our home learning offer. We have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback that you have provided via messaging, email and telephone conversations. We have also had a few parents who would like us to consider offering something different. Having considered this feedback, we have incorporated the following within our home learning offer:

From next week we will be introducing a weekly 'live meet' session with your child's class teacher (teaching assistant/leaders in their absence). We know that the children always like to see the staff and we thought that this would be a nice way to check in and say hello. The live meet will take place at 8.40 am (our usual school day start time) in order to take place prior to the staff teaching in school. The sessions will take place as follows:

Monday – 3D and 3R

Tuesday – RH, RG and 5G

Wednesday – 1C, 1B, 4H and 4W

Thursday – 6A and 6C

Friday – 2G and 2W

We ask that children are suitably dressed, mute themselves when required to do so, access the meeting from a suitable location (which must not be in their bedrooms) and refrain from commenting in the comments box. In addition to this, can you please talk to your child about appropriate behaviour during this meet. During this session the staff will also provide some general feedback to pupils about their learning tasks. We have created guidance to support accessing this material.

At Lapal, reading remains very important to us and we want to continue to promote this by sharing the love of reading, Our staff will be providing story sessions from next week for the children to enjoy. The story/chapter will be a pre-recorded session so your child can choose when they would like to access.

When logging on to goggle classroom we have now created a daily register, this helps us to log who has engaged in remote education each day as well as viewing returned work.

Next week all activities shared with the children will be placed on the platform as an ‘assignment’, this will support staff in providing personalised feedback once the children have ‘handed in’ their work. Our feedback policy will be followed; this might be an acknowledgment of your child’s effort or a comment about something we want them to revisit or up level. Where possible, we would like to see pupils return their work each day rather than at the end of the week, this will allow us to provide intervention where required. We have prepared a ‘How to Upload Work to an Assignment’ video should you need guidance on this, Mr Rizzo has placed this in the stream within Google Classroom and it can also be accessed on our school website.

Please understand that for every parent who wants more home learning, I have a parent who wants less; for every parent who wants recorded/live lessons, we have a parent who doesn’t. Please trust that we have tried to have a complete overview of our school community and have done what we feel is best. When planning our home learning offer, we looked at research, government guidance and the needs of our families. A copy of our remote learning policy can be found on our school website outlining our offer, supported by our online safety policy.

A special thank you to our reception parents this week for being patient whilst we have responded to technical difficulties with ‘Tapestry’. We have tried to swiftly respond to this issue and appreciate you moving over to Google Classroom like the rest of the school.

Staff have started to make welfare calls this week, please note these may be from a withheld number due to staff not being able to access the telephone in the main school office at this time. If we are unable to make contact, we will leave a message or try again. If there continues to be no response, we may conduct a home visit (socially distanced) as part of our duty of care.

Next Friday was due to be a school Inset day, we have decided to postpone our planned inset and will therefore be open to children of critical workers and will continue to provide remote education on this day. Details of the rearranged date will follow shortly.

Thank you for your continued support

Kind regards

Mrs Turner