Homework

At Westmorland, we have been monitoring how effective homework is, and the areas for improvement for our children, at the start of the new term we write to let you know of our new homework expectations.

Our school INTENT is “MORE @ WESTMORLAND”

MORE stands for:

M - Memorable learning. It is important to make learning stick so they don’t forget it by using songs, rhymes, pictures and then some specially trained techniques such as metacognition and dual coding.

O – Oracy. We need to develop our children’s vocabulary as much as possible, so they have a bank of words to help with their understanding, which in turn helps with their reading, writing and academic skills across the curriculum. We want to encourage our families to talk with each other at home, as such we will text the PSHE “question of the week” to all parents so that they can involve themselves in their children’s learning at home.

R – Reading. Our children to need to practice reading every day, in order to develop a love of books and ensure that they read for pleasure. At Westmorland, our expectations are that children will read, or be read too, for at least 5 minutes per day at home. This will help develop vocabulary and understanding.

E – Experiences. We want our children to have the most amount of first hand experiences as possible,      by buying things from the shops, going to the park; the beach, the funfair, the zoo…the list is endless.

Project work will also be set to complete at home, this will be linked to topics your child is studying in school.

We believe that Homework time would be better spent improving all of these 4 areas when working at home, giving families time to live experiences, enjoy learning together and talking about them.

For some children Specialist Speech and Language or support targets will be given to parents where appropriate to work on these at home too.

Thanks for your anticipated support helping your child to achieve MORE by working at home with them.

Team Westmorland.