WENSLEYDALE 23/3/20

Welcome to my first weekly blog Wensleydale!

It feels really strange to be communicating with you all in this way and I’m missing our normality already! At least the sun is shining so you can hopefully enjoy some time outside in the garden. I’m sat in our classroom at the moment and really missing you all and thinking about what we would normally be doing right now!

Please don’t feel that you have to be working all day every day! This may unfortunately be our situation for quite some time in order to keep everyone safe, so you need to pace yourself and set up a routine with your adults at home and it will soon begin to feel normal. In my letter last week, I said that around two hours of school work each day would be fine. One page of mental maths and comprehension books is fine each week for now. We can maybe increase this in the future as we find our way through this new situation. Mr Symonds has advised us to not teach you anything new, but to revise and work on things that we have already covered. It’s absolutely fine to be creative yourself and give yourself new challenges. I’ve set my own children sporting challenges this morning so I’ll look forward to seeing how they’ve got on with those once I get home! James has got to try to beat his record of ‘keepy uppies’ and Daisy has got to beat her existing record of how many bounces of a tennis ball she can do on the tennis racquet! I’d love to hear about your creativeness in trying to keep active and what you’ve achieved!

I’m sat in our classroom typing this as the children who are in school are enjoying playing in the sunshine. They are going to be doing some gardening this afternoon – weeding the peace garden and wildlife area. We’ve enjoyed some keep fit this morning and table tennis! These are all the things that you can do at home too.

Things that I’d like you to do this week are:

• Create a rainbow to put in your window for people to spot as they have a walk around our community.
• Write a prayer in your homework book. There are many people who may be isolating alone and need our thoughts and prayers.
• Write a letter to someone on your street that you think would really appreciate hearing from you. It’s great to think of others in times like this.
• www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize has some great games and activities that I know you’ll enjoy if you want to work on a computer.
• Choose three of the activities on the ‘Pobble’ sheet that I put in your packs. https://medium.com/pobble/simple-and-fun-non-screen-activities-that-children-can-do-at-home-115543cb3b9c Here’s the link to see it in more detail and in colour.
• Complete one page in your mental maths book.
• Complete one page in your comprehension book.
• At the end of last week in school, I spoke to you all about keeping a diary each day. This will be a good way to remember what you’ve done each day and write down some of your thoughts and feelings. You never know, you could even become famous and end up getting your work published. We are making history at the moment! Nothing like this has ever happened before so in future years, children in schools will be learning of how these times were for us. Think of Anne Frank’s Diary during WW2 and Zlata’s Diary during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. They are now famous…you could be too! Maybe you could find a book or notepad at home to do this in.

I think that is more than enough to keep you all busy this week. I’ll be looking at ‘Teams’ each day in case you have any questions for me and to keep in touch.

Please check on here each week as I will post a new blog each Monday.

Stay safe and well and I’ll be in touch soon

Love Mrs Simpson xx