In today’s update, we’ve a second top tip for the week. There’ll be another one tomorrow…
Tip number 2: struggling with a home learning task
Our teachers are trying to make sure that the tasks they set are accessible to all – they should often cover previous learning (giving your child a chance to practise existing skills) or they should be quite open-ended (meaning your child can approach the task in different ways, to suit his/her needs).
However, you still might sometimes find that your child (or you!) is struggling with a home learning task. If this is the case, please don’t become stressed or anxious, and don’t try to push your child in a way that could make him/her really reluctant to do more. Instead, we’ve three suggestions:
You could try emailing your child’s teacher. Each teacher will have published on the Homework page their email address – it’ll follow the same pattern as joebloggs@spherefederation.org
Teachers aim to reply on the same day, but it might involve a wait. So, another solution could be to check out a home learning task that’s been set by a teacher in one of our sister Sphere Federation schools:
- Moortown Primary homework pages
- Scholes (Elmet) Primary homework pages
- St James’ CE Primary homework pages
(Some of our teachers work really closely across the schools and will have shared the same home learning tasks, so sorry if this suggestion doesn’t always work out.)
The third suggestion is to try something completely different from this list of home learning activities. (We’ve mentioned this before, but this list has a couple of updates.) The home learning tasks are a guide, but you can choose to be flexible in your approach.
A final piece of advice we can give you is a repeat: stay calm and don’t get stressed about it. If your child can do two of the three tasks successfully, plus some daily reading and practice of something like counting or times tables, then that’s already a productive day.
And a few more things to say…
During this time, your child might end up being online more than they normally would. There are lots of sites to help make sure your child stays safe online – Thinkuknow is one of them. They’ve produced a short guide for parents of primary and secondary children.
We know that this is a difficult and worrying time for everyone – but particularly so for adults and children living with domestic abuse. If this affects you or someone you know, check out these resources to help support you through this time. As always, if you or someone else is in immediate danger please call 999 and ask for the police.
Finally, apologies to you for the short time when our websites experienced a glitch yesterday. It was for a really short period of time thanks to the support team we use, but we know at a time like this (maybe half-way through a home learning task even!), it wasn’t ideal. (Thanks to the parents who alerted us, too.)
