Friday 21st May 2021

 

Dear parents and carers of Stepney Park Primary School,

After a wonderful summer weather-wise last year, this year so far has been a bit of a wash-out, hasn’t it?! It has been raining so much and it has been so cold!

It was such a shame to have to cancel some of our activities for our Healthy Day, which we had organised for Wednesday this week. The children wore their sports clothes and all of MS2 and 3 managed to do the sports that day.  We will re-organise the sports elements for MS 1 and EYFS as soon as we anticipate a suitable dry day.  We carried on with all other elements of our Healthy day and children learned lots about healthy eating and physical as well as Mental Health. Please have a chat with your child about what they learned on that day about staying healthy.

All in all, the day was still a great success, thank you to Andy and Chris and the team who organised this for us. 

Homework 

We are now ready to trial out our new homework procedures. Having reviewed your feedback and spoken to various Senior Leaders, Subject Leads and Year Group Leads about what our children need, we have decided the following:

Rationale for this homework: 

• For pupils to practise skills in English and Maths that have already been taught in class. 

• To use the apps that children know well and the Chrome books supplied by the school. 

• To target the home learning to what each year group needs. 

• To use built-in diagnostics to track and assess children’s learning.

Our Year Group Expectations are as follows:

Of course, homework supervision by parents is important; some children will find it hard to organise themselves and others may find it difficult to motivate themselves.  We anticipate that parents do not need to teach their child anything new. The children will be practising skills they have already learned in class, and we would like them to be as independent as possible. (‘Independence’ is one of our school values after all). 

Completing homework helps children develop good study habits for when they get older and will help them retain and remember the basic skills they need as they progress through school. Please make sure your child is encouraged to complete their homework, and let us know if you need any support with this.

We will review our homework strategy by the end of the year, so we are ready for the start of September 

I hope you will enjoy reading the rest of this newsletter and about all the wonderful things our children have been learning.

Kind regards,

Edith Philipsen

Headteacher- Stepney Park Primary School