Bloody ridiculous school homework

[Dobbyisatwat]

Agh, rejoined because of new year email address and I can’t post a photo!

Year 3, first home work.

It’s a “test”

questions are as follows:

1+1=

1+3 =

1+2=

3+2 =

2+2 =

No, it wasn’t a mistake, they were being handed out as the children left the door, the sheets had their names on.

Dh picked up dd and was in a rush so couldn’t go back to ask why.

I’ve emailed the teacher asking if they had the wrong sheet it something.

The bottom of the page clearly says Arithmetic practice test, Year 1.

Any reason why year 3 kids would be getting this if it wasn’t a mistake?

New email. No idea where the year came from.

It sounds like it's just a review test to ease the kids into things. It's not a big deal, surely your kid can do that in a few minutes and send it off. Or am I completely misunderstanding your point?

I can see why this might be a first homework.

For some kids it will ease them in gently, for others it will alert the new teacher to problems (either with maths, or more likely, with organisation at home which makes any homework tricky).

For a first homework I wouldn't be concerned. Some dc have had very interrupted schooling for the last 2 years. I imagine it will give the majority of dc the chance to succeed and flag up any major problems where children would struggle to access classroom curriculum learning.

If it didn't pick up in a couple of weeks I'd pop a calm email enquiring on the plan for the term.

I just didn’t understand why they were all being asked to do year 1 tests!

I know some children are at different levels, but it just seemed so daft for them to get those questions.

Oh and this is the first homework ever since dd started half way though year one. They kept saying it was coming but nothing has ever materialised.

They were very good during lockdown though with an excellent time table of lessons, I’ll give them that.

That sounds like the reason they are starting easy. If they haven't had homework before, they don't want to scare the kids. They want to build confidence first.

Probably because of the disruption during covid, they're trying to identify the kids who are working below the expected level and see where they are at.

If its first homework they are testing the water. See who gets it and who completes it and who doesn’t. And giving the kids a bit of confidence.

YR 3 and only just getting homework seems nuts mind. We get tonnes of it. YR2.

@RedToothBrush

If its first homework they are testing the water. See who gets it and who completes it and who doesn’t. And giving the kids a bit of confidence.

YR 3 and only just getting homework seems nuts mind. We get tonnes of it. YR2.

Yes good point. And I just didn’t think about the children who fell behind last year, embarrassingly, and I feel crap for that.

They sent age appropriate tests home (posted them) every couple of weeks in lockdown, but i appreciate that some children wouldn’t have been able to do them.

That is far too easy. How much confidence will they gain from being able to do a test that says ‘year 1’ on it? They were in school for 2 terms last year so they would have had to have gone into reverse, not just fallen behind!

I think this must be a mistake.

There will be children who weren't at the stage of understanding mathematics when Lockdown #1 started and due to various factors, were not taught at home.

A really, really simple little bit of homework like that will have some children happy and confident that they can do it, others who struggled will find Homework not as scary as it was and won't refuse point blank - and others who are completely unable to do it will be identified and given extra support (a perfect use for some of the catchup funding), whether their parents are aware of the difficulties or whether they have assumed that because their child could reply to 'what's one and one?' with 'two' means they actually understand what the question and answers actually mean, rather than remembering what words to say.

I work in a school. The amount of children we're seeing that have been affected during lockdown is unbelievable. We have 7/8 year olds that can't add to ten without using their fingers, can't do simple sums, can't spell simple words and their social skills are very poor. This is a school which was extremely quick at sorting out schoolwork for the first lockdown, and were totally on the ball for the second.

Hopefully things will start to get better now, so long as we have no more lockdowns.

It is a bit easy, but I'd be happy with it TBH as it would also be very quick and I don't agree with lots of homework at that age. I have a yr3 DC and she is being set an unreasonably large volume of homework. It is already causing friction at home and is taking up a lot of valuable family time. There are specific areas of learning she finds difficult, and we could really do with using any free time for that instead. It's very frustrating.
As a comparison though OP, if you wanted one, DD's maths homework this week is partitioning 3 digit numbers.

We got an email for the whole of year 3, saying that due to a number of queries, they wanted to apologise that home work for a number of year groups had been mixed up and that children received the wrong maths assessments to bring home, please disregard and they will send it out again on Monday.

Lots of parents must have asked questions, so it appears it was a mistake and they were given the wrong printouts and year 3 must have got the ones destined for year 1.

Feeling sorry for the year 1 parents who got year 3!

The fact that people on this thread thought this was appropriate for Yr3 is a bit of an insult to our nation’s children and teachers!

@Tresal

The fact that people on this thread thought this was appropriate for Yr3 is a bit of an insult to our nation’s children and teachers!

It really isn't.

Not all schools have the same cohort and some do need to start from Reception and Year 1 for significant numbers of kids as a result of what has happened over the last 18 months.

I see they have sorted it out now and it was a genuine error but I was going to say, if they are year 3 now, the only full year they've had in school would be reception. So there will be some massive learning gaps for some of the children due to the disruption in years 1 and 2.

@Tresal

The fact that people on this thread thought this was appropriate for Yr3 is a bit of an insult to our nation’s children and teachers!

This!

Surely IF it was intentional to test the water, it would make more sense to set age appropriate work and see who was ok and who wasn't

Even for a first homework ...and even for children who struggle it's an odd homework ....most reception children could do this ....never mind Year tree....even though they are just beginning
Do it
Send it in
See what happens next.....

Ps Im a teacher of 17 years !!

Well at least you didn't get one for yr6.

@NeverDropYourMooncup I don’t know what you think the general standard of education is like in this country but it is a lot better than this, even with covid disruptions! Of course it was just a mistake.

[quote Tresal]@NeverDropYourMooncup I don’t know what you think the general standard of education is like in this country but it is a lot better than this, even with covid disruptions! Of course it was just a mistake.[/quote]
The 'general standard of education' is exactly that - a generalisation over the entire country. It takes in the oversubscribed and highly performing outstanding primary in a leafy suburb where people can spend a million quid on a house to get them close enough to be higher up the admissions criteria - and the schools where financial security (or guaranteeing there is food from one week to the next) is
inconceivable.

There are pockets of severe socioeconomic deprivation where the children do start school - and continue in school - with far greater barriers to learning than the 'average'. Throw in Covid, schools that don't have the money to access free laptops and internet connection for all, parents who were low paid essential workers or in other ways unable to provide an environment suitable for home learning and it is a very real issue that schools are attempting to address.

I've worked in some of them. And I've previously taught adults literally how to perform calculations just like that due to undiagnosed SEND, chaotic family lives, childhood illnesses where they just didn't access teaching, SEND combined with EAL It's great to be able to take somebody from pre entry level to having functional numeracy - but I had to be there physically to do it. Not only would people over the last 18 months not be able to access those same classes that I taught, they've had their children at home over lockdown - how are they going to teach? Many also have very low English literacy levels and you need literacy in English in order to be able to access numeracy in English. How would they be able to do it?

As PPs have said on many threads, they have children coming to school who aren't reliably toileting, unable to use cutlery when it's a cultural norm for their ethnicity, unable to behave in a way that enables them to learn. And that's outside the last 18 months.

So whilst the 'general state' isn't that, it's perfectly possible that some schools are trying to start things gently rather than assume everybody knows how to do everything.