to wish the school would change their curriculum occasionally?

[Potatosaladfiend]

Sort of lighthearted as I pour a (large) glass of wine.

We have three children, two year gap apiece. Lovely village school. We enjoy supporting learning at home.

The school seem to rotate their curriculum on a year A/year B basis.

This means that, for example:
Child 1, yr 2 topic, 4 yrs ago was the Crimean war.
Child 2, yr 2 topic, 2 yrs ago was the Crimean war.
And (you can see where this is going!), child 3 is in year 2 this year, surprise surprise, it’s the Crimean war.

It’s the same every year, every topic is identical to what the elder child studied at the same age. We’re hitting the same topics three times over.
I don’t blame the teachers for this at all, I understand that it saves time on planning, they’ve obviously found some fantastic resources as the same ones appear every time.

But I’m sick to death of the same subjects; the kids have heard it all before and surely (surely?!) the teachers must also be completely fed up with teaching the same things over and over again.

I know IABU and this is the consequence of having three children but lord give me strength for another year of Florence Nightingale. I really wish they’d switch it up a bit and let us loose on the Romans or the Egyptians, or basically any other topic!

It has it's benefits. Make a model of a cell/roman fort/natural disaster for homework...or get your older brother's one out of the cupboard from two years ago, blow off the dust and submit that.

My DDs have attended 4&5 schools respectively. This has lead to my elder DD studying WWII three times. And DD2 twice. Since DD2 is only Yr4, there's time for it to appear again on her Primary school curriculum...

The curriculum is changing constantly!

As a recently retired English teacher of 40+ years, both in the UK and Australia, I can see one aspect of English that guarantees repetition. In the UK, the schools have to supply the texts. What this meant was being on a carousel of having them to complete a text before handing it on to the next teacher. Every year the books were repaired and replacements bought out of the teeny tiny budget.

While the schools don't set the texts, only choose from the list, I wonder if that is part of why the list is so unvarying. It would be surprising, as the government doesn't give toss about state education mostly. What I can echo is what other teachers have said about refining knowledge and approaches.

In Australia, where all texts and materials for all subjects are supplied by the parent, English exam texts change every four years, though not all at once. I found it very stimulating to have new work to grapple with, though could be very knackering, with six new texts a year at one point.

My personal favourite was the poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe, about whom there was nothing written so I had to interpret everything myself with the class. They loved it, amazingly.

An un-favourite was the commitment to Australian texts, one very year every year group. Big island, small country, so inevitably some sub-par shite worked its way in: I'm looking at you "Jasper Jones".

@Iamnotthe1 yes, you are right. I am in Scotland, so we follow the curriculum for excellence, which is different. I believe it is also less prescriptive.

My children had exactly this and actually I loved it and so did they because they'd discuss the topics with their sibling and DD would get really excited about e.g. her turn to do Titanic.... also I only made one model bakery pertaining to where the Great Fire of London started, but it got taken in to school by each of them in turn.

Teaching the same children exactly the same topic at the same level multiple times = something has gone wrong

Teaching the same children exactly the same topic at a higher/more detailed/more complex level than previously = normal
(E.g. the human body)

Teaching different children the same topic when they are in a given year group = a curriculum.

If your kids are in a state school, year 2 should be very similar for all of them.

Bit baffled at the issue tbh. Some areas of education will be studied by almost everyone because they are ‘on the curriculum’, deemed important, are fundamental to build more knowledge on etc.

But the beauty of this is that if you store your first lovingly made papermache depiction of a Florence Nightingale ward (or Castle or Egyptian pyramid etc) you can just dust it off 2 years later....

I agree OP mine are 5 years apart and the activities they complete appear to be exactly the same, I'm much more relaxed about dressing up second time around!

You would soon moan, OP, if the expectation was that your Crimea War costume changed to a Greeks costume changed to a World War 1 costume.

Teachers have to use the national curriculum but have a lot of variety to choose from, however they can be creatures of habit and if the resources and planning are already there to be used it can be simpler to carry in using them.

@Pedalpushers

I wish I'd studied the crimean war at all! I'd heard of Florence and Mary but didn't have any idea what the crimean war was until I looked it up a few weeks ago after an episode of Dr Who. I would consider myself pretty educated as well

I actually don't remember doing any history at primary except Egyptians. I learned everything from my Horrible Histories books, guess they didn't have one on Crimea.

I was irritated by that sort of thing when I was at primary school. For example we had a WWII week in Year 3 where the teacher just went "well it wasn't all about battles" and we spent the entire week on the Blitz and evacuation. Not a mention of anything going on beyond the Home Front; no Dunkirk, no U-boats, no Stalingrad, no Berlin. No mention of WHY bombs were falling on London.

I vaguely recall the sole lesson we had on the Crimean War in Year 1/2 (it was mixed year groups at the time). We were just shown the episode of Magic Grandad. From what my six year old brain took in from the video, the Crimean war was caused because two armies happened to pass each other at a crossroads. The rest of it just covered a visit to the field hospital.