To think the Yr 6 Reading Comprehension Test today was far too difficult?

[Lottielo]

Ds just home from school and very upset because he found the reading comprehension paper much harder than previous sample papers he has done in school. He didn't even finish the paper (missed out 5 questions).

Was this paper harder than expected or was my Ds not properly prepared by his school? I know it shouldn't matter too much, but I'm worried it could knock his confidence.

Well I take some of what I said back. If the school is putting such pressure and making a child lose confidence - this is totally unacceptable and I feel for you.

We should take it all with a pinch of salt. Let's just hope everyone in the UK turns out to be really thick making the pass mark very low. The worst thing is the not knowing how things will be graded in the end. The government can make anything up with the results to skew them to support whatever they want. They can make the pass mark 20% and have 50% get As or they can make the pass mark 75% and make only 2% get As!

Putting it into perspective - I don't think the high schools are taking this set of SATs seriously and most of the kids will leave their primary school by September. So the scores will have little bearing on anything other than the school league/bragging tables, teacher performance metrics and head's bonuses! It will have little bearing on them.

My dd came home so upset yesterday as she didn't finish the test. She said it was so hard, she's not confident at all in school, she's capable but has to work at it.
She barely slept all weekend as she was so worried. We tried distractions - long walks with the dog, day trip out in the nice weather.... She was just so stressed out :(
Really made me sad. Can't speak highly enough of her teacher though, she's been amazing. She sent them home with a homework list of activities to do over the weekend to take their minds of the SATs! :)

By activities I mean non-school/revision related. Go running, go high on the swings, spin around till you fall on the grass... That sort of thing.

What's the verdict on today's SPAG?

DD seems pretty happy with it, said she thinks she dropped a few marks on the grammar side but is confident she got all or most of the spellings right.

Just maths left now which would put the fear of God in me, but she did better in that than any of the practice papers so hopefully will be plain sailing.

Today went brilliantly for our year sixes. All very positive & "easy" and not in any way like yesterday! Do you think they cocked up and gave them the year 2 paper instead?!

My daughter is at a friends house letting of steam, she sent me a text to say SPAG was Ok but she found the spelling quite hard, her friends Mum is very down to earth and sensible so if the girls seem stressed tonight I know she will talk them down and jolly them along. I am dreading the maths, it has never been my strong point so I have struggled to help with it and if the teachers carry on piling on pressure I dread to think what the next few evenings will be like. My daughter said some of the children have said they have been feeling stressed and the teacher said it is impossible for them to feel that way/they don't know the meaning of the word, in the last couple of weeks a child's mother died, various have had rows with their parents, one had an accident and the girls in the group are worried about her and all the worry about these tests, and they have their genuine feelings dismissed out of hand.

Shipwrecked

That is brilliant. Good on him

A better day than yesterday. Finished with 20 mins to spare apparently, but not sure that's a good thing! Spellings were fine, a few tricky grammar questions which he guessed but that's ok.
Loves maths and always been top of the year or thereabouts so downhill all the way now if he reads the bloody questions properly. Feel almost more relieved than he does that this whole thing is nearly over.
I did ask him though yesterday if there were a lot of inference question on the reading paper to which he replied ( contrary to popular opinion) "No not really!" So rather apprehensive about how much of it went completely over his head.

DD told me quite a few of the words, she's got a good memory. They weren't especially hard words - I know which year group spelling list those words are on as all the lists of words by year group are freely available online.

Spag paper was SO much better, as was the spelling SEN child made a couple of 'silly' mistakes but got it finished - which was a massive and much needed boost.

Maths to go ..... hoping if I keep them on task we'll get through most of the questions

CPtart a lot of children finished with time to spare, and as far as I'm aware at my school all children finished this paper

It seems to have gone from one extreme to the other. Nothing like a little consistency is there?
It will be interesting to see the papers.

Ds said Spag paper was much easier than the practice tests he's been doing and he had enough time at the end to go through his answers twice. All the kids looked a lot happier coming out of school today. He's a different child this evening!

Hope the maths paper tomorrow has no nasty surprises!

I didn't even know that there were spelling lists for the children to learn. Our school just gave random words, we never had any lists. I wish I had known to look online!

Perhaps they deliberately did this to annoy Michael Rosen who spent quite a bit of time and energy dissing SPaG, but to my knowledge has said little, if anything, about the premature literary analysis in Reading.

So far events reflect what I thought of the L6s when DD sat them i.e. L6 Reading was a crock and L6 SPaG kind of middling. L6 Maths was the least troublesome, so opinions on that will be interesting i.e. will this L6-nuSATs relationship continue?

I'm a bit at one of the words DD says she had to spell. As in, I'm wondering if she's misheard or it was mispronounced. The word she says it was is not a word, but she checked with the teacher afterwards and he said it was the word she's saying to me. Which isn't a word. 😁 She's not usually one to get mixed up and it doesn't really matter, but I'm dying to know what it really was!

My dc shrugged their shoulders and said it was easy.

What is the word Fran? Can you pm me please as dc says all the words were definitely words however they admit they got one wrong "on purpose"

DD is on the g and t register for English and didn't finish it. She said today's was better though.

Dreading maths. It's her weakness. ( like me. A's in English and c's in maths!)

Fran please share the word/non word? (are we allowed?) all I got told was one of the words was "friend". That's a Reception word at our school! So today was a doddle, all finished and no crying children.

The SPaG was very easy, IMO, compared to the sample paper. My EAL children sailed through it, even though their spoken English is not great.
However, just thought I'd point out that it's so good of the government to give us a lovely SPaG paper in the full knowledge that SPaG results are fairly worthless - they don't count towards a school's "joint" figures, i.e. Reading, Writing and maths... very frustrating.
Anyway. Nice to see smiles on the kids' fces and for them to see that sometimes fab teaching + hard work = success.

We aren't allowed to share here publicly because of the embargo. But it was the word I thought it must be and the one she wrote down initially until she doubted herself. Never mind. Maybe I'll wash her ears out. 😁

Runner I have the test in front of me now and, without giving too much away, I can guarantee that friend is not on there.

clam sorry, I misunderstood what she said earlier. She says it was a missing word they had to fill in, in a sentence about a Fred with red hair.

All the words on the spelling test were proper words and thee was only one tricky one at the end.