DD has brought home work from school that she didn't do

[mollycoo]

I was emptying the book bags this morning and DD had been given her writing lessons to take home.

It was a report All About Caterpillars, which is lovely, but she hasn't written a single bit of it herself. When I asked her she laughed and said she copied it from her teacher.

I feel a bit off about it. She can write CVC words and short sentences, but she definitely can't spell any of the words she's written down.

Is she behind? Should she be making more progress? Is copying something out like that beneficial? It's really playing on my mind.

half of the class won't be able to write... so what's the point?

This is the kind of post that really does demonstrate that patents don't understand how teaching works these days.

You know how teachers are often accused of moaning about how much work they have to do outside the classroom? Well differentiation of Yamaha and marching is one of things that's made teaching vastly more time consuming.
A reception class will have a vast range of abilities. There be children who can appear read and write, and and some that can barely draw a circle or recognise their name. And all the very many stages in between. So a lesson that might only may half an hour had to be planned, with resulting tasks, so that the most able are stretched, the last able have tasks to develop basic skills, and the ones in between also have tasks that meet their needs and development. I'm not joking when I say that a half hour lesson can take an hour and a half to plan and resource.

But this isn't a moan about that. It's about explaining that while all the children will have don't fun and stimulating activities around caterpillars, and maybe fed back what they'd learned, for the teacher to write in the whiteboard, what they did next will be highly differentiated. Five or six different tasks then being carried out at different levels is not unusual.

Be happy that your child is clearly one of the most able, who is learning to look up at the board, retain the letters and words that she sees, and transfer them on to paper.
Others as I said, will be under writing, ordering, or tracing over words. Or maybe just practising the letter C.

of Yamaha and marching

WTAF autocorrect? Differentiation of teaching and learning.

Please let's have an edit function.

Oh good grief. Appear = already, plus a zillion other typos. This is what you get for posting on a train.

If you can decipher my long post, you'll be top of the class.

Sounds like handwriting practice. Which is fine. Grab the teacher if you can on the first day back at school. Or email.

Hmmm. I’m a Reception teacher and really don’t know why OP is getting a hard time or why people are lecturing her on Piaget… —tell me you dropped out after week 1 of teacher training without telling me you dropped out of week 1–

I wouldn’t be expecting my class to copy 6 sentences. That’s far too much. Children should be able to read what they write and it sounds like this little one can’t.

There are far better handwriting, report writing and lovely crafty things to do with butterflies and caterpillars.

I wouldn’t be particularly happy with this as a parent but wouldn’t ask any more about it unless it was a pattern.

At some point they need to be introduced to something they can't do yet otherwise they won't learn anything new - I stress YET. We don't know how much writing there was (the OP quoted a short sentence - was there more?), we don't know what the child is usually capable of, we don't know the circumstances of the task in the classroom. I would expect that work was differentiated for children who couldn't write at all - I'm retired now but we had to differentiate at least 3 ways. Perhaps some did just draw a picture.

We don't know she copied off the board either. It could have been right in front of her.

Blimey OP! Reading your title I thought I was going to read about a 15 year copying work for GCSE’s or something. Not a 4-5 year old reception kid 😂

No I've been a teacher for 12 years. My point is that OP hasn't even done week 1 of teacher training. I wasn't going to give her a masters level assignment was I.

The point...whoosh

I'm a teacher and would never ask reception children to copy-write chunks of text like this. I'd expect to see them using their phonic knowledge + word mats to do their own (emergent) writing. The only time I'd tend to see copy-writing is if a child has seen the sentences in a book, or around the classroom, and has decided to copy it herself for fun!

I know when I was at in primary 1 (which wasn't yesterday, granted) when we were writing in our news books or whatever, we would tell the teacher/classroom assistant/helper what we wanted to say and they would write it out for us to copy. It helped us learn to spell because we knew what words we wanted to write, we just didn’t know how to spell them. So then we would read it over and go "ah, that's how I spell it". I imagine it's a similar task here.

My two both got to the stage in Y2 where they had the ideas and the spelling to write a decent amount but their hands hurt too much. So if they get them copying down decent amounts of text in YR it might help avoid that situation further down the line.

Differentiation of Yamaha and marching is hilarious 😂

Yes. This.

It's quite possible that OP's child copied this out herself for fun. If that's what happened, great - you have a keen writer!

If the teacher made all the children copy it out, that would be weird and poor teaching.

Or, perhaps, there was a key word bank and the child used this to make sentences.

If it's one piece of work, forget about it. If it's a pattern, try asking the teacher.