Wednesday 10th June

Good day to our wonderful community! How is everyone today? How is your online learning going?

Through your year group teachers and teaching assistants I often get to hear about what you have been doing at home. This morning Mrs Waters was telling me about one of the children in year four who has been creating games on PurpleMash. Apparently, this child has been doing his online learning with his older sister and as a reward for completing it each day he is then allowed to create the games. His aim is to create a game for each letter of the alphabet. Currently he is creating a game for ‘S’, and he has created a game linked to his history learning about the Stone Age - I was so impressed! You all have access to PurpleMash if this is something you wanted to try.

Children although we have more children in school with us now, we still want to hear from those of you who are at home - we love receiving your emails and speaking to you on the phone. You are our community and it is so important that we all still feel connected. The government has now changed its plan for all children to return to school before the summer holidays, and has indicated that all children are likely to return in September. We are not sure as yet what that will return will look like, as we don’t know what rules will still be in place around social distancing. I can promise you that we can’t wait to have you all back in school when the time is right and when we are able to do this safely.

The school staff (along with some of our year six children who are in school) have been looking at three super important questions:

1) There have been lots of changes to schooling since the country went into lockdown, of those changes are there any that you would like to keep as we move forward? For example, we have been providing you with online learning. When we return in September we are looking at whether it will be more effective to move your home learning online, rather than print off lots of sheets each week. This would also help us to look after the environment as we would be using less paper.

2) How do we ensure that we have successful transition from one year group to the next? Nobody could have predicted that your school year would end on the 20th March and we would spend so much time away from school. Every July, we always spend time becoming familiar with our new year groups and new teachers. This is really important and we do not want you to return to new classrooms with new teachers, without being able to say goodbye to your old environments and teachers. We are now looking at September and what we will need to do to ensure that you are prepared for the next stage of your education.

3) What does our recovery curriculum need to look like? If you return to school in September, you will have been away from us for nearly six months. That is a really, really, really long time. It is important that we have a curriculum that supports you back into school and that we are able to identify things you might have forgotten and new knowledge that you have gained. It is equally as important that you are able to build relationships again, to learn our routines and expectations again and to have the opportunity to tell us what you have been doing whilst away from school.

If you, or members of your family, would like to respond to any or all of the questions that we have posed then please do email us with your ideas - we can’t promise that we will be able to do everything you suggest (everything is like a giant jigsaw puzzle and all the pieces have to fit together), but we can reassure you that at the heart of every decision we make are our wonderful children.

Children, you will need to use the children@olive.dudley.sch.uk email address. You will need to email your phase leader: Miss Jenkins (EYFS); Mrs Higgins (KS1); Miss Macaskill (LKS2) and Miss Raphael (UKS2) with any responses that you have. This is your school and we want your voice to be heard.

Adults, you will need to use the info@olive.dudley.sch.uk email address. You will need to email the assistant headteachers: Mr Holder (EYFS and KS1) and Miss Walters (KS2) with any response that you have.

On Monday, your phase leaders are going to present the ideas of their mini-schools to me. Usually, I would do this as a discussion based activity in a professional development meeting (PDM) but unfortunately I am not able to have all of the staff in one place at the moment (yes, I do really miss them) so we are doing it in a slightly different way. We will let you know our plans for September when everything has been finalised and we are more aware of the government’s intentions.

We look forward to your responses. We miss your smiles and your laughter.

Stay safe.