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St Joseph's PS, Madden, Co Armagh

End of Term Update

25th Jun 2020

Dear Parent,


I hope that everyone in our school community is keeping well. Thank you to all parents who took the time to complete our survey. It was an excellent response and allowed us to see the many challenges that home learning presented for you and your children. The vast majority of respondents were extremely appreciative of the work undertaken by the school at this unique time.

I want to thank you as parents for stepping up to this challenge and I’m sure you had many tough mornings trying to motivate children in their new learning environment! This new way of working was also challenging for our staff and I want to thank them also for enabling learning to be maintained at home.

Home Learning Survey

In relation to the Survey there were very clear themes emerging:

The Need for

  • Hard copies of pupil workbooks.
  • Printed Daily Schedule for each child.
  • Teacher feedback via Class Dojo.
  • Reading books being made available for Accelerated Reader.
  • Teacher tutorials.

These are all issues that we will be looking to implement in the new term if required. Other issues relating to technology and connectivity are outside of our control. Hopefully many of you will have some of these issues resolved over the summer.

September Arrangements

At this moment in time it is very difficult to predict what school life will be like for our children in September. Being the eternal optimist I hope that social distancing restrictions will again be eased and we can get back to our normal way of school life with minor changes in place.

I will be issuing further guidance to you when the staff resume school on the 17th of August, prior to our return date for P7 pupils which is the 24th of August.

 

Confirmation Date / First Holy Communion Date

We are still awaiting confirmation from the Parish re these dates. It is anticipated that both will take place in August /Early September. We will be in contact when dates have been confirmed.

 

Book Returns
We have an extremely large number of books that have not been returned to us. We need to have these back ASAP as we simply cannot afford to replace all of the books that are currently out on loan. This will result in a huge shortage of books in September so please make this a priority  to return outstanding books to the school this week.

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I know that despite our concerns as a school, many of you will have other anxieties in your lives at this time which are perhaps more pressing. Please God many of these issues will be resolved over the next few weeks.

To all of our parents of P7 pupils who are saying goodbye at this time, I just want to thank you for the wonderful support you have provided to the school during the past 7 years. It was lovely to catch up with you all yesterday on a glorious day to say a proper goodbye ! And of course the surprise Moonpig memento for our P7s arrived today !!! and can be picked up at the school.

A big thank you to Mrs Rocks who has created this book and a beautiful whole school video to mark this unique year. You can view this below.

Finally I hope you all enjoy the summer break and we look forward to meeting you all again in August/September.

 
 

End of Term Video Showcase