Reopening Homework Club

This is a post that is far too long overdue (thanks for nothing Covid!) but is exciting nonetheless.

At The Gathering we had to close our Homework Club down back in March 2020 as the initial lockdown began, and due to a number of issues we have only just been in a position in which we could set about reopening it whilst also doing our best to ensure that the children attending are as safe as possible.

Thankfully our facilitator is raring to go again and the parents of the eligible kids are slowly getting their permission forms back to us, so we're planning on relaunching on Monday 9 May. As a church we are super excited to get this outreach going again!

We are going to start small again just as we did back in 2017 when the Homework Club first began. Initially we'll only be offering two sessions per day, Monday to Thursday to twenty four kids, with six kids per session, and only to those in either Grade 3 or Grade 4.

This leaves us with the scope to expand up to three sessions per day with eight kids per session giving us a total capacity of 48 kids which we'll hopefully be able accommodate later this year or at the latest the beginning of the new school year in January.

So for now the tablets are all on charge and once that's done I'll be updating the relevant apps where necessary. During the week I will also get screen protectors applied to each tablet, amazingly we've only ever had one broken tablet since we started.

These tablets are now five years old and are running Android 5.1 which is pretty outdated, so it would be a dream come true to upgrade them to new tablets running Android 10 at least

Once again we're working closely with the local Primary School to identify the kids who would benefit the most from attending the Homework Club and we're also in partnership with Green Shoots who provide the software on which the Homework Club operates.