Could your 4 year old do this task?

[TheVanguardSix]

DC3 is in reception and is 4 years old. He can spell basic words like cat, bat, hat. He is confident with his phonics and his letters/numbers. He brings home the basic Biff, Chip, and Kipper books.

He’s been given a task to write an email, in the space of 5 lines. My 4 year old cannot write in sentences. Can yours? I’m just wondering if he’s really behind and if this homework reflects the abilities of the majority of pupils.

I’m wondering how woefully behind my DC is. I have big age gaps, so my memory of DCs 1 & 2 at this age, scholastically speaking, is fuzzy.

I’m not trying to ‘compare’ or start a race between parents. But I genuinely feel it’s a bit much for reception and would appreciate insight from others.

I would just return it with a question mark on it!

I'd find it a battle to get my y1 or y3 to do it. (Although y3 is probably dyslexic and still struggling to write his name accurately two years after he proudly told me it has a split diagraph) Fortunately no homework other than reading in yR in our school.

Homework for infants is awful. It only benefits those with the ability and parents with time and inclination to guide them through it and just exacerbates advantage/ disadvantage.

My 5 year old in reception could write something with phonetic spelling, but he is way ahead of where his siblings were at this stage. Neither of them would have managed it.
More importantly our school would never set something like that. What is the point of homework that parents have to do? Perhaps you should help her to write an email to the school asking why she has such ridiculous homework!!

Wow you’re all so reassuring!!! Thank you! And it’s so great to hear about kids (well, adults now! ) who are off at uni and thriving, even if at 4, they just did what 4 year olds are supposed to do.

I started school at 5. Kindergarten in the States. I went from 9-12pm and then I was home. We sang, painted, and learned through played entirely. That was it. It was the equivalent of state nursery here (the ones attached to primary schools). And then at 6 we started learning to write our letters and numbers and began learning to read the equivalent of Biff, Chip, and Kipper books. At 7, we started proper phonics and reading. We had all read Charlotte’s Web independently by age 8. I’m still friends with most of my primary school friends and we reflect so much on how ‘LoFi’ it all was. Basic but thorough, no filler. We learned to write and just focused on that. It wasn’t made ‘challenging’ or ‘stimulating’. It was a lot of learning by rote. But we spent time learning, for example, our times tables by rote. We sang our times tables. We sang everything. I felt that I learned more quickly and more clearly than my own kids, not because I was brighter (not at all), but everything was presented clearly and neatly. We were not inundated with a lot to learn at once or in a short space of time. But that’s 40 years ago. Still, I remember my school days very, very well and with great fondness.

Gosh, my DD couldn't do that. Her only weekly homework (other than reading) is to draw a picture about something in her life and then I get to write a sentence underneath about it, which she has just started to try and copy. It's a really nice record of the year actually and she likes doing it every weekend.

I have a DS in reception, he's just turned 5. He could do this task as he writes loads - he's also ASD and one of his obsessions is letters and numbers, so academically he's ahead of where he should be (which is nice as he struggles with pretty much everything else at school).
However, my now 7yo DC had a similar task when he was in reception- "write a letter to someone who helps in your community" or something like it; and he struggled to even write his name at that stage. I went and talked to the teacher and said it's unreasonable homework to give to 4yos and I wasn't prepared to whip him through make him do it. Some other parents did the same, and after that the school actually changed their homework policy for foundation stage and my youngest DS now only gets a sheet with a few 'home challenge suggestions' of which you can do one or two spread over the term, but don't have to.
So I'd say talk to the school! I don't think there are many 4/5 yos who could actually do a piece of writing like this without support, and surely the point of homework isn't to have the parents do it.

By the way, I don’t mean to romanticise the past too much because the flip-side of my own ‘gentle, non-rushed learning experience with lots of time for childhood’ is the lack of understanding of and support for children with special needs back then.

sansa that’s very interesting and amazing too! And I suppose I was wondering if it’s the many or the few who have such an ability to write at an early stage. But what I worry about is DS being behind. It’s so reassuring knowing that most kids at 4 are at a similar level. Though it must be wonderful to have an early and enthusiastic writer! 👍

My ds is in Reception, aged 5 and in the top group for literacy. He would struggle with this. First of all he would have no clue what an email actually is. He could write something but it would be very phonetically spelt and not particularly coherent just contain his very random thoughts!

My 5 yr old (y1) would probably struggle a bit with that. They will be learning how to write a letter to someone in class this week, so a similar task I suppose. In reception, his only homework was reading.

DD is in Y1 and loves writing, she's constantly writing short nonsensical stories and cards etc. This time last year she would have been totally baffled by that task, she might have managed Hello Grandma love DD but no actual content.

Even if I'd got her to dictate it, I don't think she could have formed any meaningful sentences - with prompting we might have got as far as 'I have had a nice weekend'.

As a Reception teacher, I wonder what the learning objective for this task was. I know that it would not meet the needs or ability of the vast majority of my class so it wouldn't be something that I would consider suitable... Perhaps there were some instructions missing and it was intended as a speaking task with the child dictating to a parent acting as scribe??

Nope, not independently.
This weekend's homework for my reception aged DC was do a dinosaur fact file
So quite similar in terms of about 5 lines of text.
He told me the facts, and I spelled out the words as he wrote them.
I guess it verified his knowledge and he practiced his letter recognition and writing, but homework at this age seems more for the parents than the kids.

No, my 4 year old couldn't do that. He is confident with his sounds and is beginning to read well. He can write words if you tell him how to spell them. But he couldn't write a sentence independently.

Ds came home with yet another A* English lit A level essay today... The boy who wrote not one word until almost year 2...just sayin'.