St Cecilia's Catholic Primary School

COVID-19

The return to school in September 2021 has gone very well. We have been able to remove processes that were put in place to maintain social distancing and year group bubbles. The children can now meet together in the hall for clubs and assemblies.

We are still maintaining some of our health protection routines:

regular handwashing
increased disinfection processes

You can help us by keeping in touch with the school office if you develop COVID-19 symptoms and need to test your family. Children should not attend school if they have symptoms of COVID-19 and should remain at home with you whilst family members await COVID-19 test results.

We are very grateful to our school community for your support during the pandemic. We are doing all we can to keep the community safe, to stay open and to provide exceptional learning experiences to enable pupils to maintain expected progress. We will keep in touch with you about any additional measures needed closure through Class Dojo so please make sure to download the app and keep connected.

You can also help us by:

minimising your own possible exposure to COVID-19 risks
not entering the school site if you have symptoms of COVID-19 - these include a new prolonged cough, a loss of taste or smell or a fever
keeping in touch with us if any member of the family becomes infected with COVID-19

Testing for Coronavirus

You can be tested for Cornovirus at home with a test kit or at a testing site.
Click here for testing information: https://www.gov.uk/get-coronavirus-test

Keyworker registration

If you are a keyworker, please make sure to register your details with us. This can help you gain childcare in the event of school closures, contact office@stcecilias.school and we will send you a Google Form to register.

Learning at home

During the pandemic we will have children who are at home because:

they are shielding
they have been infected with the virus
a family member or contact has become infected
they have been advised to stay at home by the NHS

In all of the cases above we expect learning to continue, during term time, through our online learning programmes. Please contact your child's teacher via Class Dojo to connect with them over home learning. We do not expect children who are poorly with the virus to continue learning at home.

Communicating learning tasks with you

Since the first pandemic lockdown we have asked teachers to continue sending the weekly homework home through Dojo and Google Classroom, this will help families to maintain online learning skills.

Children in Nursery, Reception and Year 1 receive learning tasks through their parents on Class Dojo, you might find this video useful, it tells you all about how to receive and edit the worksheets you will receive:

Children in Years 2-6 receive their learning on Google Classroom. Please make sure that you have your child's login details ready to hand so that learning can commence without delay.

As a parent, if you are unsure about your own skills on Class Dojo or Google Classroom, we ask you to check out the large number of training videos for parents on Google Search, we've included this one for Google Classroom:

If you need help with login details contact office@stcecilias.school. Mr Burke and Mrs Saunders manage the Google Domain at school and are the only staff members who can reset passwords.

Chromebooks
Many families are asking us about the Chromebooks that we use in school. They are Lenovo Transformer touchscreens with 4gb Ram and 32gb disk drive, they can fold over and become like an iPad with a touchscreen. We do recommend 64gb disk drive if you can find one. Chromebooks can be found in many stores and online, including Argos, PC World and John Lewis.

Helping Children Understand COVID19

There are lots of videos online for different ages. It's best to view them first, before sharing with your child. This can be a worrying time for children, keep in touch with us if you feel that your child is particularly affected, we can support you through our pastoral care team.

Thanks again for all your amazing support and all the beautiful comments of thanks that we have received, we really appreciate our wonderful school community at times like this.