How to help your child
Top tips for helping your child become a more confident reader (8kb)
Revision Guidance for Parents (86kb)
Revision Guidance for Students (84kb)
CEOP website (Child Exploitation and Online Protection)
In order to encourage your child to read around the different subjects they are studying, reading lists have been drawn up and are available through the relevant subject department link. Please take time to have a look.
Top Tips for helping your child to become a more confident reader
Many children today do not read as much as we would like. There are so many distractions available! However, there are a number of simple tricks that you can use to help your child to read more and become more confident at reading.
- Provide somewhere quiet for your child to read and do homework.
- Have a range of reading material available at home, from books to comics to magazines. Encourage your child to visit the school or local library to pick up new books.
- If you are reading with your child, read out loud, while you both look at the text, this includes if you are helping your child research a topic on the internet. If you or your child do not know a word, show them how to look it up in an online or paper dictionary.
- If your child is struggling to read a piece of text, encourage them to look at it in small sections, e.g. paragraphs. For each section, help your child to summarise it’s main points. It can be useful to try to answer the questions; Who? Why? What? Where? about each section. These summaries could be kept on sticky notes or scraps of paper and looked at later to help.
- If your child is reading a story with you, you can help them understand it using the above summarising method, as well as asking them to predict what they think will happen next based on what they have already read.
- Ask your child to read out recipes or the TV guide ‘to help you out’ and any words they don’t know, help them to sound them out before explaining the meaning.
- Offer to help your child with their homework, so that you can help them to sound out new words and check their meanings. Also simple word games can help, such as choosing a long word and seeing which of you can make the most smaller words out of its letters.
- When your child is doing homework that involves a longer piece of writing, suggest they do a first draft on rough paper, and then spend time checking their spellings and punctuation before copying it up neatly in their exercise book.
- Talk to your child about their experiences during the day while you are not together, this improves their memory and ability to describe things in detail.
- If you are reading something, leave it lying around so you child knows you read too. Also, if you see an article or section you think would interest your child, share it with them and talk about it.
Just remember that encouraging your child to read can significantly improve their reading and writing skills for use in their school subjects, leading to higher achievement at KS3 and GCSE.
BCC Staff Favourite Books (106kb)
Safer Routes to School
Walking or cycling to school is an excellent way of improving fitness. Students who walk or cycle to school are more alert and ready to work in class too! Bicester Community College encourages all students who live in or near Bicester to walk or cycle to school, following safer routes and travelling with friends if at all possible. We also hope that all students who come to school by bus walk to/from the bus stop in their village. Where there is no bus serving a particular village, we encourage families to car share so that traffic congestion is reduced.
Over the last year the College has worked with Oxfordshire County Council to promote safer walking and cycling to and from school via the School Travel Plan.
This plan outlines the main objectives we aspire to and specific targets to help us achieve them.
Specific achievements this year
- We have improved lighting on the College Site.
- Repainted zebra crossing and zigzags making it safer for students to cross the school drive.
- Replaced paving slab paths with tarmac paths which are more pedestrian friendly.
- Replaced cycle racks with covered cycle racks and increased provision for the storage of bicycles.
What you can do
Parents of students living in Bicester
- Do you encourage your child to walk or cycle to school if possible?
- Does your child know the safe routes to and from Bicester Community College?
- Does your child have a well maintained bike and fitted helmet he/she can use?
- Do you walk or cycle with your child?
- Would you like to be more involved in our School Travel Plan?
- Do you need more information about walking and cycling?
- Has your child done cycle training?
Students living in Bicester
- Do you walk or cycle to school if possible?
- Do you take care and pay attention when crossing roads?
School Staff
- Do you need to drive to work?
- Can you car share to/from school?
Pleas for help
- If you do travel to school by car, please park considerately
- Please drive slowly on access routes and at entry/exit points
- Please do not drop off students in the College drive
September 2007 Travelling to School Data
Walk |
Cycle |
Bus |
Car |
Car Share |
Other |
Total Students |
780 |
81 |
211 |
114 |
0 |
3 |
1189 |
65.6% |
6.8% |
17.7% |
9.6% |
0.0% |
0.3% |
100% |
