Author: Mr Roundtree

We hope you all had a happy and healthy – and safe – weekend. The roll-out of vaccinations appears to be going well and there are reasons to be optimistic, despite today being what’s known as Blue Monday (and more on that later).

Like last week, we begin Monday’s message with links to a recorded assembly for your child to watch at some point in the week:

• the Moortown Primary assembly is led by Mrs Weekes
• Miss Hague leads the Scholes (Elmet) Primary assembly
• the St James’ CE Primary collective worship is led by Mrs Rowley

The home learning for the week ahead has been published – nearly always, the links are published by around 5pm on Friday. This means you’ve got a chance to prepare for the week ahead. Thanks to those of you who alerted us to some links that didn’t allow access to the recorded clips – since recording and saving those, we’ve moved to recording on an upgraded version of Screencast-O-Matic and that should help resolve this problem in the future.

We’ve had lots of really positive comments about the home learning, such as this one:

‘[She] is still loving the new learning system and able to work a lot more independently… We were happy to read other people were finding the seven lessons a push some days and we didn’t feel so naughty missing one out.’

Do let us know any questions, comments or concerns you might have. We can’t guarantee we can act on every suggestion for improvement, but we will consider them.

Finally, we did say we’d return to ‘Blue Monday’… The idea of today, the third Monday in January, being labelled as the most depressing in the year stems from a story that a university professor calculating this using many factors, including weather conditions, debt level, and time since failing our new year’s resolutions. In reality, Blue Monday is a PR stunt, originally dreamed up to sell holidays.

Regardless of whether it’s today or any other day in the year, do let us know if you’re having a particularly rough time of it and you think we might be able to help in some way.

We closed school for all pupils because of the icy conditions and forecast for freezing temperatures throughout the day. If you’ve had to travel, we hope you managed to do so safely.

Our daily Zoom sessions

These are proving popular and are well-attended. They’re a chance to review and reflect on the learning that’s been happening, and there should be time for your child to check on how they’ve carried out any task. If your child joins a Zoom, please make sure it’s in the living room or kitchen or some other appropriate space – not a bedroom. On page 10 of our Home Learning guide, you’ll find a few other points for you and your child to follow, too.

Tailoring the home learning for your child

Our assessments show that the vast majority of children didn’t fall behind too much in the Spring/Summer lockdown, and they were able to make rapid progress – our December assessments were really encouraging.

Where children did fall behind, two areas stand out for the majority of our pupils – and these are actually fairly straightforward to support at home:

• times tables – that’s why we’re encouraging Times Tables Rock Stars so much right now, and this page on our website might help, too
• spellings – during this period, we’re continuing to provide a list of spellings to learn and from 5pm today, you’ll be able to find that list alongside one of the recorded lessons for the week; this means you can be building in daily practice sessions where your child should practise their spellings, and then you could test them on a Friday just like they’d be tested at school

Contact your child’s teacher for specific areas to work on as well as times tables and spellings. The teacher will guide you to which of the seven daily sessions are most important to do.

Fitting in all the home learning sessions

Ideally, we’d like every child learning from home to do all seven daily lessons. As we said on Wednesday, that’s a lot, and so you might need to be realistic about how many you can do – five would be good as a general rule. Our advice is to do at least one from each ‘colour’ on page 2 of the Home Learning Guide. This means doing just one of the two Reading sessions, and just one of the two Writing sessions – but do the full series rather than chop and change each day. (Reading and Writing are subjects are subjects where your child won’t miss out: a lot of the learning is practice, and where there’s new learning, it’ll be returned to again in the school year or future years – this is what’s sometimes called a ‘spiral curriculum’.)

As well as doing just four or five of the sessions, there are other ways to fit things into the day if you find your child is taking a long time:

• if the teacher gives a task like writing out several sentences/answers, limit the number of sentences/answers to just the first one or two
• your child could say the answers out loud rather than write them down
• choose to end the session after about 30 minutes, even if it’s not yet finished, so you’ve got time for the other sessions planned
• think about starting the day earlier, like at 8am, if this helps fit things into a routine that works well for the family

We’d love to hear other ways you’re making home learning work – we’ll share any top tips with others.

It’s been a busy week, but we’ve made it to Friday! This lockdown situation is stressful for us all but we’re confident you’re doing a good job. We hope you have a happy and healthy weekend.

We’re closed today because of the very icy conditions and the forecast that this will continue throughout the day.

Key staff for each bubble in school would struggle to get into school safely.

Please check out our Home learning page.

Let’s have a Covid-free message today…

…and talk about snow days instead.

To close or not to close? It’s always one of the toughest decisions to make as a school leader (and arguably even harder just now because of a certain problem that I said I wouldn’t mention).

We try to alert you the day before if we become aware of weather conditions that may affect school openings, although we don’t make any decisions until the morning. Even then, though, it’s a tough call.

When we make the decision, we base it on two main factors: the current weather and the forecast.

We won’t get it right every time. Last week, based on those two points, we closed. Despite the forecast, the weather improved a little and we probably could have stayed open – the benefit of hindsight.

Today, as I write today’s message, the snow is heavy and sustained, and the forecast is for this to continue until 4pm – it definitely seems right to close.

If you’re one of the key workers or other parents who have collected your child from school – or even this morning turned round at the school gate and gone home – thank you for your understanding.

Tomorrow, the forecast is for no snow, but temperatures are expected to be below freezing point. Whether you’re a parent/carer whose child is coming to school, or one who’s working from home, take care if you’re travelling.

Yesterday’s message was based around additional or alternative ways to support home learning. Today’s message is more for parents/carers of children who are still coming to school…

As you’ll probably know from news stories, many school leaders across England continue to have concerns about the high numbers of pupils still coming into school.

Government guidance around what counts as a critical worker (more frequently called key workers) includes the message ‘parents and carers should keep their children at home if they can’.

A government blog contains this message: ‘We encourage parents to consider the spirit of the lockdown when making their decision.’

Friday’s message from us also talked about the importance of staying at home if you can. Following this message, thank you to the parents and carers who contacted us to let us know you will keep your child at home.

Based on what you’ve told us, and with your cooperation, we’ve managed to restrict numbers to a level that we can manage. However, with no national guidance around this, Leeds City Council are in the process of drawing up some health and safety guidelines around safe numbers in school based on various criteria including staffing and spaces available. Please be aware that this guidance will form part of our risk assessments and therefore we may have to restrict numbers to keep our schools safe for everyone.

In the meantime, if your child is coming to school, we’re strongly encouraging two things about the clothes they wear:

1. Your child should wear clean top layers each day (although there’s no need for anything other than normal personal hygiene and washing of clothes following a day in school).
2. Your child comes wearing extra layers for warmth (we’re keeping as many windows or doors open as we can to ensure good ventilation, but this means it can get quite chilly even inside).

Please contact us if you’re any questions, comments or concerns about this.

We hope you had a restful, restorative weekend. Today’s message is based around a variety of ways to support home learning…

First up, we have a recorded assembly for your child to watch at some point in the week (to replicate school, assemblies are usually at around 2.30pm):

• the Moortown Primary assembly is led by Mrs Weekes
• Miss Hague leads the Scholes (Elmet) Primary assembly
• the St James’ CE Primary collective worship is led by Mrs Rowley

The theme for all three is democracy, which ties in with this week’s Living and Learning theme: I can take part in democratic decisions. This was planned to tie in with our elections for a new Junior Leadership Team (our new name for the School Council) – these elections are postponed. To support younger children, talk about how even at home you sometimes make democratic decisions (even if it’s just a vote on what takeaway on a Friday evening). To support older children, you might want to talk about the scenes we saw in Washington DC last week (was that democracy – a rule by the people – or an attempt to undermine democracy?).

On Friday, we begun our series of seven daily lessons – find them listed on the Home Learning page along with our Home Learning guide. You might find it helpful to combine the lessons – or some of them – with some external elements:

• the BBC begins its three hours worth of educational programmes this week (primary school programmes are on CBBC) – check week one’s schedules and have a think about how you could combine the recorded lessons we’re providing with one or two from the BBC (Art Ninja at 11.05am might be a good reward – a relaxing programme to watch after one after doing two or three of our lessons maybe)
• Joe Wicks kicked off his new round of live PE with Joe lessons this morning – it’s a good way to start the day, but they can be watched later, too, if that works better for your home learning schedule (this time round, he’s doing these on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays)
• The Guardian had a feature recently that provided a few other ideas, such as Doctors Chris van Tulleken and Dr Xand van Tulleken offering daily videos, starting with an exploration of bones, at 2:30pm on their YouTube channel

Last time round, we provided a list of ideas that seemed to grow and grow. This time, we won’t overwhelm you with too much – our own seven lessons supplemented with one or two other activities like the ones here should be enough (and hopefully, if we’re all following the restrictions, this lockdown won’t be as long).

Thanks to the parents and children who let us know how the first week went, with lots of positive comments about the seven Sphere lessons.