Dear Parents and Carers

We hope you and your children have been able to settle into our new learning from home routine following half term. As you will be aware, this week we will be welcoming back some of our Year 6 pupils, along with those children who meet the criteria for childcare provision. Due to the strict social distancing procedures we have put in place, children will be divided into small groups (bubbles) which will be led by a member of teaching staff. Our teaching assistants will also be working in school supporting those children who require childcare in small groups. This means that having spent the period since lockdown started, working in school and from home, staff will now be working in school with a daily teaching commitment to a Year 6 group or Key Worker group. We have been working hard to prepare for the wider opening and if you are interested to see some of the changes we have made please have a look at the information on the school website.

Our new learning from home weekly newsletters have been designed to enable teachers to provide a more formalised approach to learning for their own class, but also to enable teachers to carry out their ‘in school’ teaching commitments. Thank you to everyone who has provided useful feedback: a number of you have been in touch to tell us about how well your children have been engaging with their new learning routines. We always aim to work together to create the best possible learning experiences we can for our children and thank those of you who have been in touch with ideas and suggestions about how we can make home learning even better.

We recognise, that having contact with your class teacher is really important for those pupils who will not be returning to school yet. Thank you to all those families who, during the period of lockdown have been emailing their child’s class teacher to share work or news. It has been lovely to keep in contact in this way with many of you and we encourage others to do the same. Staff are very happy to encourage pupils learning through informal comments on their work and effort, but due to a number of complexities around formal marking and feedback, we feel it is more appropriate to treat feedback with a positive light touch approach in this current situation, rather than traditional marking.

In addition to our learning from home newsletters, teachers will be posting a weekly video message to their own class on the school website each Monday. This will begin next week. We hope it will be a wonderful opportunity for children to see their teacher and for exciting news to be shared with the class from the previous week’s learning. It will also enable teachers to provide an overview of the work that has been assigned for the week ahead, alongside the weekly newsletter.

So, if you would like to share what you have been up to over the week, please share this by emailing your teacher by Wednesday morning at the latest. We would love to hear from you!

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind you about the regular posts we put on our Ridge Twitter account. If you are not yet familiar with how you can engage with this, the link can be found on our school website menu and you do not need to have a Twitter account to view the feed. So far this week, we have shared the class Poem of the Week and the 5Ps for Book Talk. If your children are budding artists, they might be interested in last week’s post about how they could have the chance to illustrate the latest JK Rowling book. Take a look to find out more!

The staff and governors are working closely together to plan for the gradual return to school for pupils in a safe and co-ordinated way. Thank you, as always, for your ongoing encouragement and support through these challenging times.

Yours sincerely

Mrs D A Hudson

Headteacher