Junior School

Welcome back to a new term of school and welcome to remote learning, St Patrick's style!

Year 5 students and families may find our approach a little bit different to what they would have experienced in Terms 1 and 2 last year, given the dozens of different schools students have come from before beginning their time at St Patrick’s, each with their own approach to remote learning. Year 6 students, on the other hand, should find this year’s experience of remote learning very familiar as we have maintained a consistent approach to what we introduced and refined in 2020.

In general, we try to keep as much consistency with a normal school day as possible, knowing that consistent routines and predictability can be reassuring in uncertain times. Students still follow their normal timetable and have five periods per day. They will spend most of their time with their homeroom or class teacher, but still have their specialist lessons too. We will try to avoid having young boys seated at computers all day, and so we have two of the five lessons deliberately ‘offline’.

We know that staying connected to friends and teachers is an important part of staying well when learning from home, so we try to provide plenty of opportunities for boys to connect with us and each other. Staying active is important too; PE lessons continue, and boys should be encouraged to make some efforts to maintain their skills for co-curricular sport, regardless of whether their preferred sport is summer or winter. Be sure to encourage your boys to look for opportunities to keep earning SOL Service points in the family and neighbourhood, too. 

Staying home during lockdown (and not having any homework!) can be a good opportunity to pick up a new skill, or work on developing an existing skill or hobby. Last year I learned to play one of my favourite Jimi Hendrix songs (Little Wing) on guitar, which gave me a real buzz. Maybe your son can learn to solve a Rubix cube, master chess, conquer conversational French, write a novel, draw a comic strip, make a stop motion film, or add some other string to his bow. I would love to see the fruits of their labours when we return to face to face learning.

As always, please do get in touch with your son’s class teacher or with me if there is any way we can assist your son while he is learning from home. 

All the best!

Ben Munday

Director of Junior School