School Closure Letter

Dear Parent/Carer

Thank you all for your understanding, patience and support over the last 48 hours when we have been finalising our plan to provide your children with ongoing education over this period of school building closure. We understand that this is extremely difficult and stressful times for all families.

Our contingency plan is as follows:

• All children have been given a home learning pack with a jotter and notebook. These extra jotters can be used for tasks where required.
• All medication will be returned with children today. Please ensure you check your child’s bag, if the medication is not just inhalers etc, but a stronger medication, you will be contacted directly.
• Hanover Street School will use Google Classroom as the online learning platform to support continued education.
• It is recommended where possible you encourage your children to stick to the school day routine.
• All children will be expected to ‘check in’ or ‘register’ daily. This will help us ensure the wellbeing of children when out of school for possibly an extended period of time. This will be in the form of ‘Morning Challenge’ which a lot the children are already used to. Teachers will check that all children have responded. If your child fails to respond for 3 consecutive days the class teacher will inform the HT/DHT, who will then contact the family directly to check that everything is well.
• There will be compulsory ‘jobs’ assigned daily with other non-compulsory tasks shared. These non-compulsory jobs will be shared across other curricular areas.
• The compulsory tasks will be set and expected to be completed by all children. Children should ‘hand in’ or ‘mark as done’ these where appropriate. Teachers will ensure that children have access to a daily numeracy and literacy tasks. Children will have a writing task set each week.
• Other sites will also be shared to support learning, there are many already on Google classrooms and school website.  BBC bitesize are looking to increase their content and have fantastic summaries for specific concepts, particularly in numeracy.

There has been lots of media coverage about schools providing continued education for vulnerable pupils and those whose parents work in emergency services and other key roles.  Aberdeen City Council are coordinating this. It will not be done on a school by school basis. We will share with you the details of this as soon as we receive it.

As we move into this very unusual period of schooling, I want to reassure you that we are still here for families as normal.  The school office and senior leadership team will be available to give support and advice.  Although our class teachers will be working remotely, they will be working every day providing learning activities, engaging electronically with their pupils and giving feedback on their learning.  We will be in regular contact with all staff too. Although face to face meetings will not be possible, the senior leadership team will be more than willing to have phone/e-mail contact with any parent as outlined in Groupcall message.

We hope to see normal schooling return as soon as possible. Please get in touch if we can help with anything, take care everyone.

Yours sincerely,

 

 

Alan Markey

 

Head Teacher