To think these are ridiculas spelling test words for a year 5 bottom group?

[olympicblues]

quite happy to be told if there is some magic reason behind them.

Gnu
Matzo
Bhaji
Alibi
Haiku
Chapatti
Tagliatelli
automobile
autobahn
bicentenary
bisect
circumnavigate

Bhaji and chapatti seem particularly unsuitable as they have many variant spellings in their anglicised forms. One could argue that any variant that approximates phonetically to the original Hindi or Urdu is a valid spelling.

What the bloody hell

DD2 who spells way better than I do, would have muttered at those and she's top group.
Dyslexic DD1 would have taken on look and resigned herself to nasty comments off the TA again.

The words are from a spelling and grammar scheme called "Literacy for Life". The books include work sheets which include the words. These words are from the year 5 books. I would have thought that a lower set in year 5 would be on the year 4 or even year 3 books.

well they are proper words, not made up.
Year 5 should be able to manage those

My DS would love that spelling list. It's a bit mad and fun.

I have already been open to the fact my spelling is awful whatyoulookingat .

My concern was that these are words given to a child who (not unlike me so it seems) cannot spell basic words including weekdays and months and some numbers and words like because and there .

Of those words about half of them i rarely, if never use and I'm 29. What does matzo mean? I think that in primary school tests should mainly consist of commonly used words with less commonly words scattered throughout the weeks i.e. Not all in one go.

If my child came home with a spelling list containing a spelling mistake I would be livid.

You would think hope? that a teacher would either be able to spell, or know how to use a dictionary to check they were right. There is something quite worrying about a teacher teaching incorrect spellings.

I would be half inclined to red pen it and send it to the head asking for an explanation as to why the person paid to teach my child to spell apparently can't spell themselves.

I know I sound mental but poor spelling is a massive bugbear of mine, and whilst I appreciate and accept that some people really struggle, for me it's not acceptable for a teacher to teach a classroom full of children something that is wrong. Shameful.

Autobahn is particularly puzzling to me. I didn't think it was actually an English word/in common usage in English. Odd.

I use autobahn all the time - but then, I live in Germany lol!

It is used in the UK more than you think, I've never once had to explain what I mean when talking about it - and you hear it regularly on Top Gear .

As I said in my previous post, these spellings should not be for a lower ability year 5 pupil.

I know adults generally understand the word.

But it isn't English - which is surely what they are trying to teach!

Probably YANBU for lower set.

how odd. there are much more useful words to learn to spell...

(and I wish I was taught some sensible commonly misspelled words too)

If you are picking apart a spelling list you need a job or a New hobby.

What Coola said (not the bit about Top Gear) and it's a ridikalas list

Matzo, bhaji, chapati, autobahn and gnu - genuinely WTAF!?!

Scene 1: Staff meeting.

Head teacher: 'Right, how are we doing with the celebrating diversity this week?'

Teacher: 'I've sent home a spelling list with 'matzo', 'bhaji', 'chapatti', 'haiku', 'tagliatelli' and 'autobahn'.

Head teacher: 'OK, Jewish, tick, south Asian, tick tick, Japanese, tick, Italian, tick, German, tick. That's covered then. Next item on the agenda...'

But they are easy to break down so could have been used to help/encourage the children to learn to spell that way? Which they should have already been taught before year 5 regardless of their set or at least that was how it worked when I was still in school

Cir-cum-nav-i-gate
Tag-li-at-elle

Applauds flim WRT stoopid tokenism that doesn't actually challenge racism/xenophobia/sexism etc but sounds good

There is a combination of Proper nouns, foreign words, words with prefixes- "bi" "auto" and "circ" which would make ^some sense if they had focused on just one of those groups, but adding in Proper nouns ( the names) is pretty mad.