To think the school year actually ends in May?

[shebird]

It feels like once SATS are over with at the beginning of May very little happens at school. At my DCs school there been lots of 'golden time' and ICT in between practice for sports day and a class assembly fir the last few weeks. Do teachers just coast along these last two months? Seems like such a waste of time to me.

We have Middle School here. Year 6 is just the middle year of school, no High School until Year 8.

There is less formal learning ime at this time of year, but I would argue that what is done is equally as valuable, and it's the stuff that builds good memories.

I expect lots of children are doing art projects, stuff about the Olympics, rehearsing for leavers concerts, going on day or residential trips, doing cycling proficiency, sports days or other sports tournaments. There is still a lot going on for them, and they are still learning and gaining experience, it's just not stuff they are going to be tested on.

Nope, there's loads going on at Ds1s school. All of it really useful and really fun.

Teachers are working just as hard.

Year 6s:

School Play
Residential Trip
Entreprenuer Project
SRE
Sports Day
Olympic Project

Other Years:

Normal lessons
Olympic Stuff
Sports Day
SRE

I used to think that things would slow down a bit, once yr11 & 13 had left at school, but it has never been a busier time for teachers at my school!

All their gained time is being taken up with preparing for the new timetables or covering lessons of those that have left and it's too late in the term (or not enough money!) to get supply teachers in. End of year exams for all yrs 7 - 10, controlled assessments for year 10, master classes for exam groups (although that is FINALLY over), endless rounds of meetings with external assessors on their GCSE groups, end of year production, prize giving evening and the list goes on!

Certainly, the students at my school, go right up to 20th July, with a full timetable of structured lessons!

The Scottish schools broke up yesterday. My ds16 has just sat his highers, and is going on to 6th year. After the exams he started his 6th year advanced highers, the current 6th year all left school after the exams.
So no time wasted here, and he's familiar with his timetable and subjects when he goes back after the holidays,

Ds1 has just come back from Germany on a residential trip. DS2 did a ten mile hike yesterday.

Lots of Olympic stuff coming up-it all seems fun and educational

It's actually one of the busiest times of year in our school.
My Year 6 are doing
Normal lessons - sometimes these are specifically targetted at areas that they want to work on, for example, in maths we made a class list of things they would like to reinforce and we are working our way through that.
I'm in Wales, so we don't have SATs but I've used my Teacher Assessments to help me work out which areas we need to focus upon during this final hapf term

Sporting Activies
Enterprise Project
Design Tecnology project
Organising a school fete
Community Project (linked to local care home)
Preparing a Leavers's Assembly

The last four weekends have included participation in a school related activity meaning that as well as writing reports I've given up four days of weekend.

If the school year did end in May someone neglected to let me know

in DS's school, they seem to slow down the classic academic subjects after the May half term. He's in Y4. However, they are madly busy with other things: swimming gala, sports day, preparation for school concert, music exams, getting to know the new teacher/next year's timetable, preparing card for leavers and welcome packages for newcomers, etc. School finishes next week and it certainly doesn't feel like they are just sitting around waiting for the last day to come.

Having spent the last few weeks helping to prepare our yr3/4 for a concert which we performed twice yesterday....I am absolutely knackered,and we've still got till the 20th July! Still to come ...all the sports week things,culminating in an Olympic sports day,y6 preparing for their leaver's assembly, a visit to a local conference centre/theatre with other schools in the area to sing songs we have been learning most of the year,together, we have to have days with new classes to prepare them for transition in September. We have in the past few weeks had jubilee preparations, and the Olympic torch pass right by our school. We've made Olympic banners for our school hall.
Admittedly not necessarily academic stuff, but the children are still learning,whatever you might think.

Our school is much more relaxed this half term, but they still do an amount of work-work.

We've got an 'Olympics Week' next week, which as far as I can make out is a week-long sports day.

There are a lot of school trips - DD2's (year 2) class is going shell collecting to the beach, DD1 (year 5) is going rockpooling to the beach.

Practice for an end of term production

Making stuff to sell at the school fair

etc, etc, etc

But, they're still doing spellings, reading, we're getting a numeracy and literacy homework sheet once a week

YABU

"many secondary schools start their new timetables after May half term so no coasting there. However, tis easier for the secondary teachers as there are no year 11 or 13, which gives time to get some planning done if you're lucky."

DD is in year 7, but started her year 8 curriculum last week. She is being pushed more and been given tons more homework this last week. So there is no coasting happening in her school.

Hmmm. We've certainly entered the knackered time. Everything that is being done now is less efficient as the kids are tired and so are we. All of the academic stuff that gets done in schools could certainly be done with four weeks more holiday, as they have in most other European countries.

But we are also a bit of a babysitting service in this country, because that's the way the economy works. I would also argue that a lot of the activities we do now are very social and thus children still learn a lot of valuable non-academic lessons from them. I like this time, because we tend to have non-curricular freedom. My kids will mainly be filming horror movies next week. Really looking forward to it!

I would say y6 finishes in May, but other yrs carry on until at least the last week.