Daily update 22nd April 2020 – Home Learning update
As you’ll be aware, we’ve surveyed staff and students about their experience of Home Learning with a view to making tweaks and improvements and it’s been really fascinating and useful. We have listened to the feedback given and will be introducing a few changes.

For the week beginning Monday 27th April (next week) work will be set slightly differently for students. We will be staggering when the work is set and we will create consistent deadlines to help students with their routines and to prioritise tasks. It will look like this:

We will be using our own resources and those that have been produced by the teaching community across the country. These might include the Oak National Academy and BBC Bitesize resources, as well as a wealth of other resources that have become available over the last month.

KS3 Teams chat is being unlocked
We know that students and teachers would find it useful to be able to use the chat facility to support learning and feedback so we have unlocked this facility. The older students in Years 10 to 13 have already had access to this facility and it has been incredibly useful for them. They have shown that they are able to use it in a mature fashion and have communicated very responsibly through the chat facility. We have therefore decided to open this up to the younger students now to support their learning. It is important that students only use this facility to ask their teachers questions about their learning and must not use it to communicate with each other. We are expecting students to be able to use this sensibly. If they are not able to do so and you have any concerns about this, please let us know and we will ensure that the facility is removed for students who do not use this as it is intended.

Types of tasks:
We have listened to feedback and will be setting less assignments overall, instead we will be setting assignments that are more straight forward and have one clear task that the student must complete. We will be avoiding PowerPoints, lengthy booklets and complicated instructions. There are likely to be fewer tasks, but these might include an open ended task that we would encourage learners to embrace in a creative way wherever possible. Tasks are likely to be based on recall and reinforcement of prior learning so that, when we return to school, we are able to tackle the more complex topics and ideas together, based on a good foundation of knowledge. Any new material covered will be on the basis that this is a simple starting point

from which to build on our return. There will always be extension and challenge tasks available for students who need extra work.

Art Competition
We are introducing a weekly Art competition that will run Wednesday to Wednesday each week. We wanted to give people something to smile about and be creative at the same time and we thought that, for this first one, it would be lovely to include our pets! The idea is that families dress their pet up in their NK school uniform (not fully of course!) and take a photograph and/or do a drawing. Then submit your entries to Miss Hibbs at melanie.hibbs@nkacademy.co.uk or reply to a daily update with your entry and we will pass it on to Miss Hibbs. Please see the example of Poppy below.

Continue to stay safe everyone.
With very best wishes,

Jo Tunnicliffe
Headteacher