I’m a Reception teacher AMA!

[Rycbar]

As we’re heading towards the end of another school year and lots of parents are preparing to send their little ones off to school in September. Ask me anything you want to know or are too embarrassed to ask about reception!!

Ah school reports! I’m not sure about other schools but we like ours to be positive no matter what. You might need to decode give me some phrases from it and I’ll see if I can see any hidden meanings!

I’ll give an example - Billy knows the school rules and tries really hard to follow these.

could mean

Billy honestly doesn’t give a hoot about the rules even though he definitely knows what he shouldn’t be doing.

or it could mean

Billy actually does try really hard but he’s immature/impulsive and this doesn’t come naturally to him.

Sorry I missed your second question.
Yes friendships at that age are really fluid and if your child plays with other children and is happy I wouldn’t be worried!

It’s a tricky one because reading the decodable reading book multiple times is really key to building up their fluency.
However, I actually think reading for pleasure is more important! If your child is progressing well with their reading and there are no concerns then focus on whatever they want to read whilst trying to get the phonics book in to. Maybe make a game - time how quick you can read it and see if you can beat the time etc.

Yes, I absolutely genuinely love my job. I recently suffered a miscarriage which was devastating and work was my safe place. You can’t be sad with a room full of 5 year olds!!

I love being with the children, I love seeing them grow and develop. I love knowing that I’ve made a difference (I had a parent cry today because of the change in her son since he started and she was so grateful).

I don’t like the ever impending doom of OFSTED and creating paperwork just for them. I don’t like the fact funding in schools is absolutely dire. I wish we had more support doe SEND children. We also always half joke that the worst part of the job are parents.

the holidays are great but you do genuinely end up working in them. We break up tomorrow but I’ll be in school on Monday sorting my classroom out and I’ll be in more days after that too.

I think it’s wonderful you want to join the crazy EYFS but I would suggest getting some experience if you haven’t got any already because it’s hard to known if it’s for you until you experience it!

If you have Instagram the phonics fairy is a good person to follow. You can have a look at YouTube for proper pronunciation of sounds too (one of the biggest mistakes is this!) think M as an example. A lot of people will say Muh as the sound when actually it’s mmmm.

it’s hard to advise anymore as I’m not sure what the curriculum in your country is like. Will she be going to an English speaking/teaching school or joining the counties curriculum?

DS starts reception in September - he seems to be very mathematically able though not genius level (e.g. can already count in 2s, 5s, 10s, can tell you if any number up to 100 is odd or even, interested in learning times tables). What should I hope for in terms of maths teaching in Reception that will interest and challenge him - I would say he already has a deep understanding of numbers up to 5, for example? (He is DC3 so it's not a case of PFB!)

I know you don’t want parents to teach phonics in advance of reception.
My child attended a pre school which followed Oxford reading tree and will go to reception at a different school that follows a different scheme.
Is there anything I can do in the holidays to reset/unlearn the old system/otherwise help the transition to reception

Id be tempted to leave it, if staff who have been trained in phonics are delivering it then there shouldn’t be too many misconceptions (if any). School will baseline your child when they arrive and will go from there.

If I had a child in my class like this I would check that their level of understanding was deep and that they hadn’t jus learnt things by rote (not saying your son has, however we do get parents who think their child can do things when it’s been very surface level). If from our assessment we can see that they do have that deep level we’d deepen it! Best practice for challenging children now isn’t to love them on to the next thing it’s to deepen and master those skills (some we call maths mastery). They might ensure he can use those maths skills in reasoning, solve word problems using the maths he knows etc.

Thanks @Rycbar for all the insights. I don’t want to post any part of the report on here since it’s a public forum but I do appreciate the offer.

Thank you @Rycbar. I don't know what the formal criteria are for "deep" understanding but his understanding of.numbers seems pretty good to me... if you ask.him e.g. what 40+50 makes, he will say 90. I asked him what odd numbers and.even numbers were and he told me that "even numbers are flat on the top and odd numbers have one sticking up" i.e. referring to the shape of a Number block. He will find the word problems (and written arithmetic) more tricky for a while as his language isn't particularly sophisticated for rising 5. Obviously the teacher will want to prioritise getting him to speak more and socialise well - I just don't want him to lose his love of numbers!

This is useful thanks. She's in the school system of the (european) country we live in. Luckily the standard of English is very high here in general so I don't think there'll be any real issue with her learning to read and write both languages well once she properly starts school. It just seems such a long time away that that won't be for 2 more years! Doesn't help that so much of English is unphonetic either 🙄🙄. Do you introduce the ideas of those unphonetic words already in reception or is that for when they're older?

The teachers will know best how to challenge him so don’t worry. An example of a deeper understanding is being able to tell you why the evens have flat tops and the odds don’t instead of just being able to tell you that they do or being able to think about odds and evens without using that particular method too as it can be a bit flawed. Karen Wilding is an early years maths wizard so would be worth following on Facebook or Instagram!

Yes we do, we call them tricky words and explain that they just don’t work with phonics. We start with very high frequency words like the, to, no, go, my, me etc. We also teach some words as tricky which they’ll be able to decode at a later date but because they appear a lot in books we do it earlier. An example of this would be the world ‘like’ the year 1 children will learn the split digraph (two sounds that have another in the middle - this one being i-e) that will make this decodable but we teach it in reception as a tricky word.

My daughter has pretty much taught herself to read at 4½, is this going to be a problem? She seems to be following the principles of the phonics scheme though. I don't think her phonics is wrong. But I think she knows rules "out of order". Like the Y sounds like an e when it's at the end etc. but doesn't know her 'ou' sounds for example...

Is she going to find it frustrating to "start again"?