Week 1 of Online Learning in the Early Years – thank you for your support!

Dear Parents

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for supporting your child in getting acquainted with their online home learning programme over the course of the last two days. We have been delighted to meet our Reception – EY2 children in their live Google Meet sessions and have loved seeing our youngest children in Nursery engage with their Seesaw learning activities and begin to make posts of their own.

Next week will see the start of our small group live sessions and specialist lessons for Reception to EY2 children and our Nursery children will continue to get to know Seesaw by engaging with their learning activities, our Nursery teachers will also be hosting Parent Teacher Conferences (the link for which has been posted in the class announcements which can be found by selecting ‘inbox’ on Seesaw). Please note that your conference day and time was communicated in your child’s Nursery Welcome Pack, if you have forgotten the time, please contact Angel Tang at: [email protected].

We will also be launching our activity packs for Nursery and Reception and Reading packs in EY1 & 2 which can be collected on Thursday and Friday. Please refer to your child’s year group welcome letter for more information on these packs.

We are aware that communication between home and school is crucial, especially during this period of online learning and would like to remind you that all communications relevant to your child’s year group will be posted on the DBIS Hub under ‘School Bulletins’ which can be found here. This should be your first port of call for any information relating to your child’s learning or year group specific information. Each Sunday you will receive a bulletin round up email to summarise all the bulletins which have been posted throughout the week. Please do check the Parent Hub regularly for information, particularly during this period of online learning. Moving forwards, unless particularly urgent, I will also be posting my communications to parents here too. Please also keep an eye on the ‘class announcements’ on Seesaw by selecting ‘inbox’ for information pertinent to your child’s learning.

We were delighted to welcome close to 200 parents across the Early Years Phase to our IT workshops led by DBIS’s Head of Learning Technologies, Angela Moriarty. These were extremely successful and feedback has been very positive in terms of helping parents to get set up on Seesaw. If you were unable to attend the workshop, please find a link to the recorded session here.

We will be hosting further IT drop in sessions for parents and will communicate dates and times once these are arranged. In addition, please contact [email protected] if you are experiencing any difficulties accessing the live sessions through Google Meet or Seesaw. Once again, a reminder to all parents, that when logging into Seesaw, please select ‘sign in with Google’ and if accessing from the app, please ensure your child uses the ‘class app’.

Once our children have completed their first full week of online learning I will be contacting parents who have expressed an interest in joining our Focus Groups to arrange our first meeting. These meetings are designed to positively and constructively discuss our Early Years online, home learning programme so that we can continue to develop our programme and offer the children the best possible learning experiences throughout this period of closure. We would love nothing more than the children to be in school learning with us, however they can and are able to learn in an online learning environment and we are committed to ensuring this is the best it can be.

Finally, I would like to also take this opportunity to acknowledge the hard work of our Early Years Teaching Team and thank them for their efforts in getting our online home learning provision up and running. I would also like to thank you as parents for the support you continue to give your child and us as a school to ensure we are able to work in partnership to help your child continue on their learning journey throughout these most challenging of times.

As always, please do not hesitate to contact me, a member of the Early Years Leadership Team or your child’s class teacher if you have any questions or concerns.

Have a lovely weekend.

With best wishes

Hannah Cole

Head of Early Years