Pardon my dimness, but infant teachers, what is..................

[Aero]

........a medial phoneme?

Does it simply mean middle letter, or is a secret code that I have never heard of before, but feel I should have?

Dd has received a sheet of words and been asked to find words with the 'medial phoneme' 'o' or 'e', but there are no words on the sheet with those as middle letters which is why I ask. I assume then that she is meant to think of these words herself.

Also, is it the latest craze to try and teach infants who have not yet mastered their letters properly to try and do 'fancy' joined up writing. Dd is totally confused and frustrated with all this and has been in tears tonight because she finds it too difficult. She's 5.5 and in year one and I feel there is just far too much pressure to learn all this. Also, to learn spellings and be expected to write them down when she still gets her letters mixed up. She can spell the words aloud, but gets them marked wrong when she's clearly just written certain letters back to front! This just upsets her as she knows she spelt the word right iyswim.
Can you tell I'm a frustrated parent?!!

I put this in chat, then realise this might be a better place for it.

I agree Twiglett. I can only speak for my upper key stage two classroom I suppose - but all of the stuff you mention goes on there. I would hope to receive homework notes when ds1 gets to school in September as KS1 isn't my forte. I know I give notes and recaps if any 'involved' homework is given. If that makes any sense at all.

Anyway.
Dinner (and the darn breast pump) beckons

Twiglett, I quite agree. We can all have a good laugh about "temporal connectives", but that example came from a state primary school in South London. Many of the parents do not speak any English or are illiterate or have mental health problems. For a school to be using complex terminology for an age group at which parents are expected to be largely supporting their children is just not reasonable under those circumstances. I used to work for a Government department which took making its publications comprehensible to the general public very seriously; I'm the state education system seems to make less of an effort when really it should do more.

Ahhhhhhh, Cadbury - yes, please do call in if you're in town. Can't help re Boots though - have been pretty much housebound all week so haven't a clue. I did pop briefly into town to pick something urgent up, but wasn't in Boots I'm afraid.

Twiglett, yes, that's it pretty much in a nutshell. I do feel intimidated by it and I know her teacher is just teaching in the way she has been trained, but dd is five. She won't be six until end July and this is just causing un-necessary frustration for her because I don't know about it.

I do not think that homework for children under ten, which is what we are talking about, should contain jargon that is near uninitelligible to 40 year old adults with English degrees and a lifetime of experience using the English language. That's madness IMO. I certainly don't think a crib sheet is the answer. I think plain English is the answer, I honestly do. And I'm not taking the piss and don't even know why you are saying that. I think George Orwell wrote brilliantly about the use of English. He said that plain writing is good writing, and in 99 cases out of 100 I agree with him. 'The middle sound' is a better, clearer phrase than the 'medial phoneme'. And I agree with Twiglett re alienating parents. If schools want parents to do the work/cooperate with the school, then the school should be communicating clearly and in plain English.

Sheesh, unintelligible

Perhaps a letter to the minister for Education???? lol - for all the good it'd do.

If I sent children home with the musical equivalent of this - I would go down to around 3 pupils.

I might use the words polyphonic and da capo in the lesson. But I would write, make sure xxx gives time to the section marked A and remembers to do the repeat (marked DC on music).

Message withdrawn

Words with an "o" in the middle would have been fine. Let the kid impress the parents by saying "it's a medial phoneme" if they want to.

Gosh - you were up early bloss! I do agree about learning what's what in maths when they are a little older, but for literacy (and wasn't that just known as English), well I really don't see the point at all, but I do want to be able to help dd as I feel she needs loads of encouragment to learn to read and write.
I guess maybe all the jargon might be slightly more useful later when they are writing their own stories etc, but at this age they're concentrating on learning to write their letters properly, learning the sounds etc and the English language is complicated enough to learn to read and write as the rules don't always apply to everything, so why complicate matters?

Cooming to this very late, but I have to say that I have yet to see any of these terms being used here (in Scotland), much to my relief. Completely agree that they risk alienating parents. Ds is in P7 and they are encouraged to use "joining words" to make longer, more interesting sentences. That's about the right level of jargon, it seems to me.

aloha - i wasnt referring to you with the taking the piss comments.
sorry if you thought that 0 twas fairyjay taking the pis of my rubbish typing

sorry not on top[ form atm

Oh, I am pleased. I thought you'd taken my post the wrong way. It was interesting (for me!) to think of how I'd approach the task.

and interestign for me too

my ds, also five,also year one, came home with homework which said'help alex to consider non standard units of measurement'.

what is a non-standard unit of measurement? what do they class as a standard unit of measurement?
dh has a phd in maths-he didn't know.
turns out it means he should be looking at things and thinking-this is twelve cubes high, or this is 6 books wide.that kind of thing, so that they learn why we have centimetres etc.
but what a way to phrase it?
i agree that way too much jargon is being used.
they're 5 ffs!

For those who have all this rubbish coming home from school - please contact the school....unless they know that people are unhappy, they won't do something about it. I bet something will be done quickly if it is raised.