Remote Learning – a half term reflection

Over the course of the past 5 weeks, we have delivered a full curriculum to all our children from Year 1 upwards via Firefly and have been delighted with their engagement and the standard of work they have completed.

The curriculum at RSM has always been carefully tailored to the needs of our children, using unique programmes and resources and this leads to the excellent academic outcomes that we see year on year. When school moved online, we looked at the current progression of each individual year group, their learning to date and the plans in place for the remainder of the year, so we could ensure that the learning delivered remotely continued in the same way it would have done, had the children been in school.  By doing this, the accelerated pace of learning has been maintained and this would not have been possible had we implemented the one size fits all approach to the curriculum that has been adopted elsewhere.

There have been some inevitable technical issues with delivery, and we have evolved and adapted our approach where necessary to improve this. The introduction of easily accessible buttons for technical support and wellbeing are just some of the amendments that we have made to develop the online experience for children and parents. Our parents partnership and support have made all the difference here and we are so grateful for their positive, can-do attitude in the face of these challenges.

Feedback remains a vital part of the children’s learning online and their teachers have been reviewing every piece of work daily, as they would have done had they been at school. The Firefly platform has facilitated excellent two-way personalised communication and the children have particularly enjoyed leaving voice notes and using emojis. Their responsiveness to technology is a marvellous indicator of their adaptability and resilience – important future skills. The teachers have been particularly pleased with their enthusiasm for the new combined humanities topics this term and their reflections within Philosophy 4 Children lessons continue to highlight their tremendous thinking potential. We are all impressed by the quality of work we are seeing.

Of course, all of this has to be balanced with time away from the screen. Often it is whilst riding bikes, playing in the garden or being a bit bored that true creativity is fostered. It has been lovely to see super art work and to hear about dens being built, wildlife being spotted and new outdoor skills learnt.

The resilience of the whole RSM community has been brilliant and below I share just a few of the positive comments we have received from parents, children and teachers.

From Parents:

“My thanks go to the teachers who have being preparing and recording lessons that are easy to understand, interesting, fun, achievable for the children to complete and parents to help with!”

“I am so pleased that my children are cooperating and helping each other and working so independently. It has changed their approach and resilience to their learning.”

“A video explaining the task with examples followed by relevant documents was easy to understand, systematic and simple for both our children and ourselves to navigate.”

From Children:

“It’s fun and easy to use and to get into the resources. It is exciting to see what the work for the day is.” ( Year 3)

“I look forward to seeing the feedback from the teachers and wasn’t expecting to see such lovely comments on my evacuee work.” (Year 5)

“It’s a really good thing that I can upload by own tasks on sport and on music. I have really improved my own IT.” (Year 3)

“Maths this week has been such fun.” (Year 4)

From Teachers:

“We miss the children but it is so good to have a system in place where we can review and see so quickly how they are getting on.”

“I am amazed at the quality of the work coming through. The children are obviously working exceptionally hard and presenting it all so beautifully.”

“This will give them a real boost before senior school where they will have to work independently and access lots of digital tools.”