Falkland Primary School

Although the school is remaining open for key workers children only, the government advice is that it is safer for children to remain at home and for you to attempt to home educate them.

To this end, we have provided, on our school website, a vast array of suggested activities generally arranged in year group order. On the website there is a tab called School Closure Work which has a number of pages with suggested activities on them. These are mainly links and suggestions, there is nothing that needs to be accessed on the computer itself. Most of these activities will need a few minutes of your time to talk your child through them.

There is no expectation of how much of this work is to be completed or for how long. These are very stressful times for everybody and it is more important that everybody remains calm than that the last piece of work is done.

We particularly like this quote that we found on Facebook:
There is no academic emergency this week, so don’t be so quick to set up a home school. Our country is in crisis and we are all stressed and tired. Stressed adults cannot teach stressed children. It is a neuro-biological impossibility. Try focussing on connections and feelings of safety.

Each household is different, each family is different, each set of circumstances is different – there is no ‘one size fits all’. Each family needs to do what is best for them.

The upshot in all of this, is that when all of this is over and normal school resumes, we will have to do a lot of revision work with children so all anyone can do at this time is their best.

I would strongly suggest that very few children will manage more than 20 – 30 minutes focusing on the work that we have offered. For younger children, 15 minutes would be a maximum. We suggest that little and often is better than a longer period. The timetable we are olowing in school is a maxium of 2 hours of work in the morning and the rest of the time spend on sport and more creative activities.

Many of your children will prefer to go onto Purple Mash as most of the activities on there are more ‘fun’ orientated ie there are drawing packages, games and other more open ended resources. We would advise that you restrict your child’s access to this in the same way as you may do other web based activities.

If you are struggling to log on to Purple Mash, it could be that the site is busy and waiting for it to refresh will hopefully solve this problem. Please do not worry if your child cannot access Purple Mash, it will be more useful to them if they have been using it regularly in school and will then know how to access it.

There is more than enough work to keep your child busy for an hour or two a day until the Easter holidays. There will be no work set during the Easter holidays but the ideas and resources will be refreshed after Easter. The work is organised in year groups, with a separate section for the Den children, but there is nothing stopping any child accessing work from a different year group.

Stay safe, keep positive and remember that academic progress at a time like this is less important than wellbeing.

New update 

homework@falkland.w-berks.sch.uk   will be running from Tuesday if you wish to email asking for help with your child's homework

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