As a result and in light of the increasing level of difficulty in the terminology used in the new GCSEs, we have invested in an innovative literacy improvement tool called Bedrock Vocabulary.
It is an online platform designed to help students extend and learn important and relevant academic vocabulary.

As your child progresses through the Bedrock curriculum, they will study hundreds of new words. Students must complete a minimum of 2 online lessons per week which will be set as homework. This will be set every Monday and need to be completed by midday on the Friday. Your child will need to leave 24hrs between each online session as the program is designed to develop memory retention. If there is no access to the internet, our library is open daily from 8am to 4.10pm.

Research as shown that there is a direct link between a student’s vocabulary size and their academic achievement. Children with a wider vocabulary make faster progress at school, in further education and beyond. Narrow vocabularies affect directly students’ grades. Helping students to improve and widen their academic vocabularies is essential if standards and outcomes are to improve.

To further improve students’ vocabulary, we will be working alongside Bedrock to design a series of talking prompts. By using these with your child, you can help support their learning of this important academic language at home.

The “talking prompts” curriculum is being developed with parental feedback; your contribution will be of great value and much appreciated. We are launching the programme with the year 8 cohort next week. The tutor team and Ms Grapine will be monitoring the student’s engagement and progress. We will keep you informed with any further details on how best to support your child complete work online weekly.

For your information, please find below the steps to follow to use the “talking prompts”:

Step 1: If you have not done so already, create your Bedrock parent account. Visit this page if you need help, www.bedrocklearning.org/createaparentaccount

Step 2: Visit https://www.bedrocklearning.org/supportmychild

Step 3: Download and print the talking prompts. If you are unable to print at home, select the relevant tick-box and your prompts can be sent to you in the post

Step 4: Make sure your child is working through regularly as part of a weekly routine. You can find out which block your child is working on by looking at your parent dashboard. Check the word level data and the recent activity report.

Please do not hesitate to contact your child’s form tutor or Head of Learning should you need any clarification or further assistance.