Welcome to our guide to Home School

- who thought we'd ever be designing this!

We hope this will help navigate you through the myriad of suggestions "out there" about how to learn  around the family table.

As you read on, please note that where a subject is shown in orange, this indicates a link to another page on the website. Click on it to be taken straight there. 

The current health crisis has changed school as we know it for the foreseeable future.

On 20th March, our school and all others in the UK closed to the majority of pupils; we had a handful of days' notice to prepare. At that point, we put together a range of home learning options and created a Home Learning section on our Classes page. It quickly filled with ideas and has had over 1,500 visits. You can still access it if you found a favourite link there.

For the new term we have created a new page, Home School which is easier to navigate. It  has sub-pages for different subjects and areas of learning, and Year Group pages for lessons specific to children of that age.

Here we are collecting and creating for you, a range of activities: many will be online, others offer a downloadable print-out to complete on paper; while some suggest hands-on tasks to aid learning.

Since we "closed", with government backing, professional organisations getting involved and local authority input, there are now a wealth of  opportunities available. From famine to feast! It's likely you have even found some of your own too.

With some experience of our own under our belt, we feel we are now in a position to clarify our "Billingborough Offer"; setting out some sort of structure to help guide families towards what, we hope, our children might achieve when they are learning at home.

Purple Mash - Keeping us all connected

Class blogs and e-mail

Keeping in touch and feeling connected with each other contributes to children feeling safe and well; this is the basis of a successful mindset for learning. 

We are using the secure 2Blog and 2Email functions within our Purple Mash platform to ensure pupils and teachers have safe and regular contact. Full details of how to access these are on our Purple Mash page. We request you support your child to log on at least once a week and either e-mail their teacher or join the class blog with a comment. We will use these messages as a safeguarding register: if we hear from you we know you are safe; if we don't we'll contact you to check everything is alright.

For our Early Years Home Schooling children in Nursery and Reception, Mrs McCormack has created a web page of resources especially for you!

All subjects are included but particularly helpful will be the specially-created "Power Learning"* activities, which help incorporate learning into everyday experiences. From sorting socks to washing the car, everything is covered and you can earn points as you do so!

There are daily tasks and weekly projects, which are refreshed regularly, including - importantly - Monster Phonics*. 

Please upload your experiences and observations to your Tapestry* account,

where Mrs McCormack and Mrs Hopkinson will  be delighted to hear from you and will reply. 

* All covered on the Early Years Home Learning Page

Years 1 to 6

BBC Bitesize

As a school, we have decided to make BBC Bitesize the "Cornerstone" of our home school provision. There are many good reasons for this:

• It provides an age-appropriate English, maths and one other (on rotation) subject lesson per day
• It is a national website, easily accessed from any device with daily updates
• The platform is financially backed by the government and will receive ongoing investment
• The BBC has huge resources and reliable provision including well-known presenters that the children can relate to, taking some pressure off parents
• It has a wealth of educational material and film footage in its archives
• The online offer is linked to informative magazine programming on the red button, BBC iPlayer on your television
• Devised by teachers and educational professionals, it provides parent guidance, downloadable activities as well as online video lesson content

Most importantly, the coverage will continue to be provided, whatever might happen locally. So if your teacher was sick or had their own domestic crisis to attend to; if something unexpected occurred at school, your child's learning would continue to be provided for.

We have created a Bitesize page to tell you more and suggest how to best use this resource.

We acknowledge not every family will choose to have BBC access. There will also be varying amounts of options for technology use in different homes. We are therefore signposting you to two further webpages on our school site which have alternative offers. The Oak National Academy (online) and Lincolnshire Learning Partnership via the Keystone Teaching School (downloads for use offline).

Oak National Academy

This is an online school supported by the Department for Education for Reception to Year 6 and beyond.

Each day offers a school-style English and Maths lesson plus another subject for every year group. The lessons are about an hour each in duration and are delivered by a teacher, in a classroom with video, reading and graphic content. As such, they are a very good representation of a lesson in school. They do, however, require a child to have use of a laptop or tablet/desktop or a smart phone will work too (just a smaller screen)  for the whole lesson and as such are technology-intensive. However, if you have safe IT equipment and a peaceful space for your child to work, this is an excellent resource and well worth a look.

The Keystone teaching school, part of the Lincolnshire Teaching School Alliance (LTSA), have created resources for home schooling in the form of booklets and packs.This includes English, maths and, so far, two super Lincolnshire Wildlife science/geography resources.

These are available to download on their page of our website. These cover 2 weeks of learning at a time and we will update them as we receive them. If you would like to use these, and you are unable to download them at home, we can arrange to have a paper copy made in school ready for one of our 3.30 pm collection points. See more details on our LTSA page.