to want my child's teacher to understand how apostrophes work!!!

[intothenever]

DD is writing things like 'She live's in a house' and has been taught that the plural of potato is potato's! I am getting really pissed off!

At secondary level teachers do correct spelling and grammar and we do teach spelling and grammar regardless of the subject.

I am pleased to see it return because I do think that poor literacy holds people back. That does not mean that we speak the Queen's English all the time and in informal situations everything has to be written perfectly. However an ability to "turn it on" when needed is necessary .

I agree password .

LaQueen I think you're right in your assumption that the "old-fashioned" methods of teaching in many others countries leads to a higher standard of SPAG.

We recently had a HT who would not allow the teaching of grammar as a separate entity and believed it should be taught as and when it emerged as a difficulty during writing.

What a load of tosh - thankfully he has now gone and the standards have improved since his departure

And if infants spend their entire time worrying about SPAG they would never write anything..
I'm sorry but that is crap. My daughter writes at home a lot and I say 'this bit is great, that needs a capital letter, that word has an 'e' on the end. And trust me, she writes screeds.

I absolutely think that teachers should have an excellent standard of spelling and grammar. A teacher should know how to place an apostrophe. Teaching a child the correct punctuation right from the start is a no brainer, as it becomes second nature to them.

Agree, my daughter was always corrected, how else are they supposed to learn anything? She's now doing creative writing for one of her A levels so it can't have put her off too much.

I don't believe that there will come a golden window of enlightenment, when suddenly SPAG magically makes sense to a child, and it all falls into place.

Of course not. Grammar is now explicitly taught, which is as it should be. (Trust me, I was the Grammar Police at my school and that was also with the staff!).

But I have seen how English is taught now. I was taught one way, my children another and my grandchildren are being taught a mixture of the two. And I think they are now getting it right.

Also, another misconception. Emergent writing is about content (mostly). As grammar is gradually introduced - capital letters, full stops, commas, question marks and so on - they would be expected to be used correctly.

If a child. started using full. stops in the middle of Sentences with random capitalisation it would be corrected.

But emergent writing is what they start with (well, after mark-making on paper), it isn't 'taught' alongside semi-colons and the Oxford comma. They come once the child is writing 'properly'.

Well I totally disagree with that, Nanny. I would expect all my child's mistakes to be corrected from day 1.

because I do think that poor literacy holds people back

Yes, absolutely it does. It also detracts from the content of what you are saying because incorrect grammar and spelling can radically change the meaning of statements.

Like LaQueen, I've seen some really sad vitriol here aimed at those who criticise teachers for incorrect and frankly ignorant SPAG.

Read, read, read, to and with your children. They absorb good SPAG by osmosis.

Well I totally disagree with that, Nanny. I would expect all my child's mistakes to be corrected from day 1.

Which means that some children's work will be absolutely smothered in red green ink.

Which means a) it thoroughly demoralises them and b) they can't see where on earth they have to start to correct it.

Look at how your children's work is marked now. I highly doubt every error is picked up on. I bet they have clear areas to work on and specific targets where they need them (be it apostrophes or the use of the subjunctive).
The marking and targets will be set individually to clearly set out what your child needs to work on and towards.

But please note, grammar is now (or should be, it's in the Nat Curriculum) explicitly taught. In an age appropriate way. And tested in the SATs

I think it now works very well.

Read, read, read, to and with your children. They absorb good SPAG by osmosis.

For most (some) children, yes, I did. Doesn't work for all, unfortunately.

Like LaQueen, I've seen some really sad vitriol here aimed at those who criticise teachers for incorrect and frankly ignorant SPAG.

So have I.

Well they don't add semi-colons or anything but if DD writes something like

I wnt to a pty i like cak i do not like gams

then it would be corrected to

I went to a party. I like cake. I do not like games

with a quick explanation. I don't see that that is so terrible? DD has been at school about 7 months; she now understands that sentences begin with a capital letter as do proper nouns. She certainly hasn't become demoralised, on the contrary she writes every spare minute!

PS she is bright but not exceptionally so, prob in the top third of her class.

On the issue of correcting teachers, I think there's a world of difference between what I've sometimes seen suggested on here, where parents want to mark a newsletter up in red or whatever, and send it back (and quite often, amusingly, they're wrong anyway!), which I do think is petty and spiteful, actually... And pulling a teacher up if he or she is 'correcting' a child's work wrongly, which this one does seem to be.

Being a coward like that, I would probably have just told my dds what the right way is and rolled my eyes... But really, the 'potato's' thing needs to be addressed.

That said, dd2 just read the OP over my shoulder and said 'that won't have happened: the mum will have told her it's wrong and she just will have said 'that's what the teacher told me to do'. I know that's turned out not to be what happened, but at least it suggests that today's children aren't routinely taught 'potato's'.

I actually had to take a teacher aside last week to point out that it wasn't correct to say "I seen a rabbit" after she had "corrected" a child who had written "I saw a rabbit"

??

Potato's??

All teachers can make mistakes - they're human. Of course when we are in a hurry we do 'daft' things, things we wouldn't do if we were only doing one thing at a time.

But for god sake - both of those are terrible mistakes.

Potato's - You have to go and see the HT.

The examples I've seen are, sadly, not teachers making daft mistakes, they honestly don't know the correct forms.

A few choice examples I've seen/heard recently -

I've already did their reading

I've wrote that on the board

Well done Jenna, you catched the ball

All genuine quotes from teachers

I went to an interview recently. There was a spontaneous task which was to teach possessive apostrophes to year 5 children. Only a small group. The head seemed quite pleased that I knew what they were

I know too many teachers who can't punctuate. Nor can they do "hard" maths. They also lack general knowledge.

You do see random apostrophes in children's writing. Even if they've been taught about apostrophes. But you should not see potato's.

I did complain about a teacher to the Head. Because I'd just seen too many mistakes.

But I don't think all mistakes should be corrected. Especially with emergent writing.

i sw mn

You might ask the child what they meant. You might write "I saw a man" - but the child would probably not read it.

Corrections work if the child understands them and responds to them.

And - are you marking the objective (e.g. to use adverbs in a sentence) or marking the punctuation, spellings etc?

It's hard to know what degree of marking and correcting to do.

Corrections work if the child understands them and responds to them.
Surely if a child is consistently making the same mistake and the teacher is not sure if they will understand the corrections, the answer is to write "see me" and then explain it to them?