Today, we were notified that Elliot has received a Deputy Head Commendation aware for his performance in the recent examinations at school. A great result acknowledging his determination and resilience through the last few months – a really impressive result.
Now, he needs to build on this for year 9 and onto his GCSE’s 🙂
This week has seen the start of the Zoom school lessons for the boys – well only Elliot so far but Oliver’s start on Thursday.
It has to be said that the teachers have done a brilliant job translating over to video lessons, with Elliot’s English teacher leading a particularly impressive lesson yesterday. She totally commanded the virtual room and kept all that were online, attentive and on point – great work Miss Smith.
Later in the day, Simon had not been aware that Elliot was in a lesson, and the ensuing flatulence was not a particularly welcomed noise for the virtual lesson….. whoops
All joking aside, the education from Silcoates through this tough period has been really very well put together and has kept both boys engaged and on point. Oliver has needed more extra motivation in order to get going and keep going but Elliot has taken to the approach like a duck to water.
We are fortunate that the boys both have a laptop and that there is space in the dining room for it to become a virtual office during the day – shame that the real office in the garden is not yet finished with the renovations as that would make it better still – hopefully we will be finished down there by this time next week – the photos below should demonstrate the current progress – we are waiting for the plaster to dry. (ignore the bikes, they are just being stored in here short term since all of the office furniture is in the container, hence there was no room for the bikes
We are now three days in and have learned a few things…
1. Make sure to get out and exercise in the middle of the day to break up the lessons. It seems that by half way point, the kids would WAY rather go out on a dog walk than do more classes, BUT at the end of the day the only thing that the dog walk is doing is get in the way of Xbox….
2. Prep the night before – having the lesson plans printed and ready to go removes and issue relating to internet access on the day
3. Focus – Oliver is even worse with his focus issues in a school environment – just one of the dogs wandering into the room is enough to disrupt his ability to concentrate…. and he would like to listen to music…. y, right!!
4. Mid morning snack – core to keeping the beast that is the hangry gene from mutating all over the dining room….
So we are ready to go with school, albeit at home. The boys teachers have set them up with their first lessons and daddy day care is set to commence in under 30 minutes 🧐
Mum is heading out to the office at the bottom of the garden with only Alexa drop in to keep here entertained as to our progress 🙂
Wish us luck – there is alcohol for the parents that make the end of day 1 unscathed I hear….
Last night was Olly’s parents evening and we had 15 minutes with his two core teachers.
Bottom line is that he seems to be happy at school (which we fully agree with now that the issues of earlier in the school year with one of his classmates appears to be resolved) and that with the exception of his ability to retain focus during lessons, he is doing well overall.
His SAT scores are 102 for maths and 110 for combined English. Therefore he is about where he should be (we did hear that phrase perhaps too often last night) although would really be helped with additional focus.
At this stage we are pretty happy with his progress and will knuckle down on his focus and writing – we saw clearly last night that he absolutely can write neatly, he just needs a greater focus on it and more and more practise.