Dear Parents and Guardians

 

By seeing the children in ‘meets’, seeing their learning and the chat following my daily videos, I still feel in touch with the children.  I wanted to take the opportunity to be in touch with you.

The staff are working incredibly hard and I hope you feel supported with the home learning.  We understand that this time is difficult for so many of us, juggling work, learning and everything else that family life brings.  Do keep in touch with us via Google Classrooms and/or Tapestry and the finchparents email account. Hopefully the staff phone calls are helpful too. 

 

There is so much to celebrate with learning that is going on everyday whether that is on or off the curriculum.  It is on those hard days that we must step back and reflect on the situation we are in.  We would never have imagined this and we are all trying our best which is all we can do.  What is important is our health and with the national figures as awful as they are, I urge you to treasure your family and know that your best effort with home learning is good enough.

 

We have some key worker and vulnerable children at school and they are completing the work from Google Classrooms as well.  I wish to thank our key worker parents for the wonderful job they are doing.  The safest place for our children and therefore families, is at home.  I know that many Key worker families are able to keep their children at home with them which is for the best and will help towards keeping everyone safe.  We have, over the past 3 weeks, had 3 members of our in-school community access tests for Covid-19 but thankfully they have been negative.

 

From Monday 25^th January staff will begin Lateral Flow Testing twice a week, this will hopefully detect asymptomatic staff and is a positive step forward.  Whilst it is a lot to initiate, I know staff feel reassured by the opportunity to test and I hope feel safer as a result.

 

This Monday I challenged the children to run as many miles as they could before next Monday and I am so proud to see how many children have joined in.  On Monday, I will post my morning video and the children can comment with their mile totals.  We will then see if any of the children have run more miles than Mr O’Reilly.

 

Our physical and mental health need to be a priority and to emphasise that and to give the children a change from the daily learning routine (and parents), we are planning a special day of wellbeing learning for Wednesday this coming week.  I hope the children look forward to it.  I will share the learning for the whole school on Google classrooms and Tapestry at 3.30pm on Tuesday.

 

In the meantime I wish you all a safe and relaxing weekend

 

With kind regards

Jacquie Vanstone