Hopefully everyone is starting to develop their new lockdown routines and managing to balance work and family commitments with home learning. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need support or are finding things tricky. You can contact teachers directly via Microsoft Teams or email us through the school offices.

 

Here are today’s updates.

 

Huge St Saviour’s Assemblies 

We will be restarting our live online assemblies next week for groups in school and children at home. These will be set up slightly differently to live lessons and will involve children at home clicking a link that will be shared on their Teams chat. The weekly assembly will take place at 11am every Wednesday – keep your eyes peeled for the link that will be dropped in your Teams chat on Wednesday morning.

 

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) support with Sara Hibbs (SENCo)

 

Yesterday (Thursday) an email was sent to all families that have a child on our SEND registers inviting you to book an initial meeting with Sara. This booking system goes live on Monday 18^th January at 9am. Please check your emails for more information.

 

Sara also has her own page on the school website, that she will be updating regularly with resources and advice for families. Please click here to visit her page.

 

Hot Meals 

From next week, we will be able to offer hot meals for children in school as well as the sandwich options (cheese, ham or tuna). These will not be cooked onsite and will be transported in insulated containers from a local hub kitchen. Children will be able to order these meals in the normal way at registration. Junior School families will need to pay as normal through School Gateway. The menu can be seen here – next week (18/01/21) is ‘week 2’. 

 

Free School Meals (FSM)

The Government has announced that the national FSM voucher scheme will restart on Monday 18^th January. We are in the process of switching all children on FSM to this system. You should receive information on your vouchers directly. This will replace packed lunch collections that we currently have in place. Please note, that the Government have announced that vouchers will be released on a staggered basis across the country and we do not know where our schools are on this list. Therefore, family may not get their vouchers sent through on Monday but when issued the full amount will be calculated from Monday. If you child is still attending school, vouchers will not be issued as they will still be able to access a free school meal in school.

 

Community Food Take Away

Unfortunately, at present we do not have the staffing capacity to pack up food parcels and deliver these to families like we did in the last lockdown. We are still hoping to help our community and will be trying something new this lockdown. On a weekly basis we will put out ‘community food take away’ for families to collect outside either the Infant or Junior School. We will aim to do this every Tuesday, however the day may change if deliveries are delayed. When the food is available, we will post an update on our Twitter and Facebook page. Food for this will be supplied by the charity FareShare and is not linked to any Free School Meals scheme and therefore can be accessed by anyone that needs a bit extra for their families. 

 

Thrive Session for Parents and Carers

During the Summer, Mrs Simmons ran a series of live Thrive sessions for Parents and Carers. These sessions were put together to give an overview of the Thrive approach, which can be used to support children (and adults), both generally and during lockdown. The sessions include specific activity ideas and scripts which could be useful in certain situations (paper copy of the scripts are linked here). These sessions were recorded and can still be accessed and watched on our school YouTube channel. Click here to visit our page.

 

Maths support 

We have a published Maths ‘Calculation Strategy’, which can be found here on our curriculum website page (in the Mathematics section). This shows the different ways in which we approach the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) in school, and is split into Key Stage groups as follows: EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage: Reception), KS1 (Key Stage 1: Years 1 and 2), LKS2 (Lower Key Stage 2 – Years 3 and 4) and UKS2 (Upper Key Stage 2 – Years 5 and 6). There are separate documents for each of the four operations, and additional White Rose (our maths scheme) documents which explain the benefits of each strategy. We hope these documents will be useful when supporting children with maths calculations at home. 

 

Online Safety 

We have a dedicated website page to support families with online safety. Please click here to find out more

 

Safeguarding update

There are new expectations on schools regarding child protection through this lockdown. We have updated the ‘Safeguarding Policy Addendum’ to reflect these. This document can be found here.

 

As always thank for you for your continued support and we hope you have a relaxing weekend.