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If you have the opportunity to use a bilingual support partner to help families who have learners working from home, it may be useful to prepare a list of questions for this staff member to ask. Bilingual support is extremely useful when making contact with parents who speak little or no English.

General care

  • Is everyone in the family well?
  • Do you understand the rules about going outside?
  • Are you going outside every day?
  • Are you meeting up with friends and family?
  • Is there someone who can help you if you need anything?
  • Are you worried about anything?
  • Have you got enough food and/or medicine?
  • Do you know how to contact the emergency services?

Accessing school work

  • Is your child working at home?
  • Is this easy?
  • Does ____ have access to a computer or similar device?
  • Does ____ have access to WiFi?
  • Do you have access to email?
  • Does ____ have a quiet space to work?
  • Does ____ have their school books at home?
  • Do you have paper and pens at home?
  • Do you have any story books at home?
  • Is ____ working every day on school work?
  • Do you know how to contact your school?

We’ve created an easily downloadable list of these questions to ask parents when calling home, which you can download by clicking on the button below.

Further learning - Blog

A sign with 'Phonics?' on it
Created: Tue 12th Apr 2016

As educational pedagogies continue to move cyclically, with new strategies moving in and out of favour, the battle of reading approaches continues to rage on between the 3 main approaches: Synthetic Phonics, Analytical Phonics and Whole Language methods. They are often viewed on a continuum, with the Whole Language approach (Top Down method) being the least skills based and the Synthetic Phonics approach (Bottom Up method) being the most (see figure 1).

Collaborative learning activity template
Created: Mon 25th Mar 2019

This ‘Introduce Me’ activity is a fun and rewarding way to introduce a new topic, while developing language skills.

It’s ideally suited to learners of English, allowing them to hear knowledge  presented in different ways, by more than one source, in a non-threatening environment. There’s plenty of opportunity for repetition and rephrasing. This is an adaptable activity to suit any topic where you need to introduce content. This particular example is based on trading goods (see References), but a blank template is provided for you to create your own resource.

Created: Sun 16th Feb 2014

It’s hard to even start to highlight the challenges of teaching EAL students in such a short article but there are a few key areas to consider:

Including learners of all cultures into the classroom environment and the school