St Mark's CofE Primary School

Summary:

1. Easter work much reduced, and not compulsory. Suggestions, not actions!

2. Normal home learning- do your best, don’t worry about completing it all. Reducing stress and improving wellbeing much more important.

3. Daily ‘home learning’ emails are ending. Check year group pages directly!

4. Happy Easter!

Easter Work

I want to reassure you that Easter ‘home learning’ will be significantly reduced over the two weeks. I feel that parents, children and staff need a rest. There is no expectation to do anything over the Easter period. However, staff have made some suggestions of what you might like to do, and these will be put online soon. For some families, these suggestions may be helpful and fun!

The mental health and well-being of everyone is much more important, and switching off for a season is vital – albeit difficult in the current situation.

Home Learning Workload

I am very conscious that families across the school have varying capacity to do the home learning work. Some may feel it’s too little, some too much, some just right. Many parents are working from home which adds to the difficulty. Some families have limited technology access. For others, knowing how to support with the learning is hard and sometimes adds to the stress.

Please remember – just do your best. If you don’t get all it done, don’t worry. It’s ok. Better to get less done, and do it well and without stress. Set yourself a manageable target. Not everything needs to be done everyday, and teachers are working on clarifying that in the posts.

We are providing work to support learning and give children a sense of routine, but not at the cost of over-burdening family life. We’re on your side!

I hope that helps clarify things.

Email Notifications

Finally, you’ll be seeing fewer email notifications from the school (e.g. promoting the daily learning tasks). Please do check up on the year group pages for any work set: YrR ….. Yr1 ….. Yr2 ….. Yr3 ….. Yr4 ….. Yr5 ….. Yr6 . Facebook will continue to show the updates, too.

I wish you and your family a restful Easter break. Take time to enjoy each other’s company, play some games together, tell some (good) jokes and remember how precious family really is.

Mr Applegate