"Formal" learning - should it be put off til 6 yrs old?

[KembleTwins]

what do you think?

Just interested really.

but Ellie - what when the child WANTS to do a worksheet - to show their working out, they ASKING to sit down and do "formal" stuff??

It would be wonderful if every child could be sat down with and given verbal work at their own individual level.......but that's just not going to happen is it?

Have just been talking to DS (year 1) and although I appreciate he may not be an entirely reliable source it appears that in his school they do have a combination of "play" and "sitting down learning" which he thinks is about the right balance.

They seem to have play first thing in the morning, then more formal learning after break. In the afternoon there is again a combination of play and formal learning. He is definitely learning a lot .

He also loves to do his homework straight away on Fridays . He does seem to have been ready for more formal learning throughout at least some of reception and now in Year 1, but I don't know how much of this is due to him being quite old for the year (birthday in November), just his own personality or the fact that his school has a mixed nursery/reception class which I think all the children benefit from. Or more likely a combination of the three .

DD starts in the nursery part after Christmas and I am interested in what she will be like

Well, at the moment I have designed tailored programmes for my most able children to do on the computer as extension tasks. I also give my 'top group' a separate plenary which does indeed involve individualised higher-order thinking skills questions.

Currently as a school we are using the Abacus Evolve programme and it has a workbook with it. 4 days out of 5 the children do practical activities, for example using 10ps and or place value cards to learn counting in 10s. On the remaining day they do a workbook activity. They do enjoy it because they feel like 'big children', but to my mind it is not as valuable a learning experience as the practical stuff.

I think it is bizarre that because children are 'into' worksheets we should therefore teach like that all the time. Worksheets have their place, but they don't involve an awful lot of thinking. You can be structured, if that's what you mean by 'formal', through more practical stuff. If the teaching in a school is high quality then the children would get far more out of an extended problem solving task.

Wow, maybe it's just my school that has a formal Year 1. Oh, and ABetaDad's. Playing in the morning? My head would have a coronary...

Ellie - the problem with that comes when a child is bored of doing activities on the computer lol - DS2 did that for much of the summer holidays and was keen to start writing his findings out and working out maths "problems"

He's dying to try some of the KS2 bitesize, as that has activities, an explanation and the "quiz" (worksheet I suppose) - but he can't read the instructions yet.

I think that it should be put off until 6 yrs. However learning through play isn't an easy option. I find reception the most difficult class to plan for-give me a year 6 any day! I love working with the reception DCs, because it is a real challenge-it is easy enough to send them all off to play but far more difficult to make sure that every DC is getting value from it.

Ok, well somehow I manage to keep them engaged, lol! Number shark is great, and education city. I think we have a good balance of different learning methods. But I swear there are better ways than endless worksheets

well I presume that other methods other than worksheets are used in the classroom for the "formal" teaching - I just have to rely on worksheets for him to write stuff out at home as I don't have the money to be spending on endless numeracy programmes that have more exciting stuff - and my own maths skills are too bad to be able to help him learn stuff.

I still think though that if you leave formal learning until they're 6 (presumably we're talking YR2) it's going to be too l ate for some children, in the same way that the current system is too early for others. Someone is always going to "lose out" (wrong term really but can't think of a better one) whatever age you do it.

And then formal learning will always be too early for children like my DS1 no matter how late we leave it

trickerg - I want my children to go to your school! Where is it? I shall move house.

Our KS1 runs in much the same way as reception if children aren't working directly with the teacher or TA they can choose from the resources in the classroom. This year more opportunities are available for learning outdoors and the "Creative Curriculum" extends into KS2 so not a lot of sitting in rows doing worksheets anywhere just lots of practical experiences (oh and good SAT results at the end)

Does anyone know, who is Ed Balls' shadow and what's the Conservative's policy on later starting/play-based Year 1/deferred entry for summer-borns as a matter of parental choice?

I'm on the point of giving up on Labour on the summer-born issue - perhaps better to start extracting promises from the Tories?

I think it's Michael Groves

Linglette - Michael Gove is the shaddow. Not sure if you would get a reply though... I e-mailed him about a matter a week ago (as it was his area plus he is my local MP) and have got nothing back. But it may be worth a try.
No idea what the Convervative policy is.

www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6025096
However, both the anti-centralisation and the subject specialist recommendations will appeal to the Conservatives, which have pledged to move funding from agencies to the frontline.

David Laws, Liberal democrat spokesman for education, said: ?The strength of the report is that it?s not been commissioned by the Government and its terms of reference haven?t been unnecessarily restricted. It is able to recognize some of the achievements of primary education and progress made in the last decade while also being willing to be critical about those things that have gone wrong. We feel very strongly that the degree of micromanagement and interference is on a scale that would never have been tolerated and would have been seen as shockingly totalitarian 30 years ago.?

mrz - have you looked at the Northern Ireland curriculum for YR / KS1 (and 2) - it's excellent.
www.nicurriculum.org.uk/foundation_stage/
Take a look under 'useful resources' particularly.

It's prompted us (in KS1/2) to make our creative curriculum more enquiry based - so we're led by what the children want to do and molding our planning around it. The EY docs are great too.

Thanks. Yes I was thinking it might appeal to the Conservatives...... this could be the way forward (sadly). I blame Jim Rose more than Ed Balls or the PM - it would be hard to find time to get their heads round an issue when the person they specifically briefed has singularly failed to do so. Parents of August-borns and kids born prematurely are not a natural community - if only we were Gurkhas or something

under bad conditions you mean? (the Gurkhas, that is).

Ellie, our school has a lovely reception and a formal Y1 too.

My August born dd1 had a wonderful time playing in reception, but found Y1 incredibly traumatic. She was still learning to read, but there was very little emphasis on phonics. (She is 9, so I know things have improved). She could not read the worksheets, and so they were fairly pointless.

My July born dd2 found Y1 much easier because she was on free reading before Christmas. She was therefore able to read the instructions on the worksheets that she had to fill in. However, she did not gain any particular satisfaction from sitting at a desk all day. Her writing skills were not advanced, as (unsurprisingly) she had the fine motor skills of a 5 year old

Both dd1 and dd2 would have gained more from doing formal work in the morning and free play in the afternoon. However, what they got was worksheets for most of the day plus 30 mins of golden time on Friday pm if class was good.

I'm really not sure how I feel about this.

Ds attended a montessori nursery from the age of 2.6 and transferred a year later into the the nursery class of a state school. He found the transition quite hard and I regretted moving him. The school was very pushy and and very academic and didn't seem to recognise that he wasn't even quite 3 and a half. Ds could write his own name when he started but didn't have the correct pencil control and couldn't form the other letters of the alphabet very well. He had also gone from an envirnonment where teaching took place on a one to one basis and struggled with having to give answers in a large group.

Ds did make progress during his nursery year and when he joined a reception class I was told that he was of above average ability. By the end of the reception year he seemed to have grown bored of the foundation curriculum and was bored and restless with the learning through play that takes place in the foundation stage.

Ds turned 5 in August and is now in year 1. He is thriving under the key stage 1 curriculum, he enjoys sitting down at tables dto complete work, and is much more focused with the academic work, enjoys his spelling tests and doing sums. I think if ds had been forced to complete a another year of the foundation curriculum it would have driven him made and he would have got restless and played up.

It is difficult, children all have different llearning styles and develop at different rates, ds isn't top of the class by any means but he is a lot more focused when the work is more academic, the complete opposite to how he was when he started the foundation curriculum.

I don't know what the answer is but I think childrens individual needs are not taken into account enough and this needs to change.

I like the Montessori method. Children develop entirely at their own pace and although they are free to choose their own activities it seems to be more structured than the free play that takes place under the foundation curriculum.

Thanks for the link trickerg

Yes, linglette. Shabby treatment - put in lowest paid jobs, no support services in place particularly for the wives, no support for EAL at school, etc, etc.

Sooo - and would be particularly interested to hear from the teachers on this - what do I/we do if we believe that it's better. Especially given that the odds are that the government and any potential next one is going to sit there with its fingers in its collective ears going la la la.

I'd love DD to stay at her brilliant, play-based Montessori nursery until 7 - but that's not an option. And given that the 'good' schools round here are v formal, where do I go?

Do I home educate until 7 or 8 (not sure I have the temperament for that)? Or move to where there is an independent play-based small school? (I do have one in mind). Or what?

I suspect that most teachers have excellent social skills; that has been my experience. How could they not have? To teach well you have to be able to understand and communicate with a wide range of character types, and you have to be confident enough to speak to and influence a whole room full of other people. Teachers see things (like everyone does) primarily from their own experience, as good communicators.

But lots of people don't have good social skills. Sometimes that is because of upbringing and school experience, but a lot of the time it is innate. There is plenty of research showing that introverts and shy people are born, not made. No amount of informal learning will teach those people to have really great social skills.

I cannot imagine anything more awful for my DS than to have to undergo extended informal learning. Just getting through the informality of reception nearly destroyed him. That year was the worst year of my life. All these people who want children to do maths verbally (by which you presumably mean orally), can you imagine being a shy child who is afraid to speak to the teacher, but who isn't given the opportunity to show what they can do through writing rather than speaking?

Someone mentioned earlier about children who can decode things they cannot comprehend. My DS was accused of this; he was actually just afraid to express himself orally. Asides from that, decoding is a really important skill that has many uses other than in literacy. DS still loves code breaking and is giving lots of opportunity to do it at secondary school.

Many children come from backgrounds where they don't hear adults using a wide vocabulary; the only way they can learn to comprehend more is if they can decode more first, because they can only learn that wider vocabulary through books. A child has access to a teacher for a few hours a day, but if you teach them to decode the child has control of knowledge and choice over what they want to learn.

The only study done in this country that looked at the outcomes of informal learning in terms of social inequality showed that, in comparison to traditional methods, the play based curriculum widened social inequality. This was reported in the TES and then ignored by many teachers.

My DD had a great time learning through play, but she had great social skills.

Children are individuals; they don't all learn in the same way, or benefit from the same methods.