official letter from dd's school telling me they are going to lower standards:and they are proud of this!

[hk78]

thank god there's a place to get this crap off my chest!

i've had a letter from school, telling me all about the 'new marking policy' (i wasn't aware of the old one )

basically, the main theme of the new policy is that "not all spellings are corrected. We feel that it is demoralising to a child if there work is covered in red pen - I can remember that feeling well from my own school days!"

1. they are proudly sending a letter to say they are going to let things get even more slack

1. 'there work is covered in red pen' ????

i don't think there's any point in even complaining - no-one is bothered any more are they?!?!?

Demoralising for small children to get their work properly corrected? That's ridiculous. It will be a hell of a lot more demoralising when they grow up and can't spell properly and cannot get a decent job.

Do you correct every single little slip that you child makes in their behaviour Anna?

Or do you do some now and correct others at a later date?

Because by using your logic, you child will never learn how to behave, and will then probably never get a good job.

having a page of 20 corrections, on every page, regardless of the subject, stops you learning how to spell. It doesn't help you in any way at all. I just makes you feel worthless.

And re getting jobs, I've never gone for one that I didn't get

I would like to see my dc finish primary school with reasonably accurate spelling and a good grasp of basic grammar, text structuring etc, so I would like to see the school correcting more rigorously and working on those points.

If we are just talking about the first 2 years, I can see the teacher's point about not wanting to discourage fluid writing.

Agree with mb, I think correcting 3 or 4 spellings in a piece of work is enough. For example, ds1 is doing a piece of creative writing at home (his choice) - he is retelling the story of Beauty and the Beast, but including himself as a character. He is 6. The language he is using is fantastic (though it might be cribbed from the film) - things like 'he had no love in his heart', 'Disgusted by her rags he sent her away' etc. Spellings are interesting to say the least - 'carsle' for castle, 'onse' for once, 'prins' for prince. But what he's writing is fantastic. If he were to do that at school, and it came back COVERED in red pen and spelling corrections, it would be SO demoralising, and I can imagine next time he would stick to safe words, like 'he was bad' 'she was good' rather than experimenting with adventurours language. He's also working very hard on improving neatness, finger spaces, capitals, full stops.

But if at the end of the piece it said something like 'Excellent writing, well done on your finger spaces and some lovely language. Try writing the word 'once' and 'prince' - look at the 'ce' sound at the end, then he would be more likely to remember them, rather than 'Good. Spellings - Once Time, Prince, Castle, etc etc etc'

I teach piano, and if a child brings a piece they've practised, I don't stop them at every mistake, I always let them play straight through first time, then we might work on one section, or we might think about the whole interpretation etc.

Agree they should have got 'there' right though!

I don't understand how any school worth its salt could get to a point where children have 20 spelling mistakes on a page.

The school has got a major problem with teaching spelling if this is the case and it needs to sort this out, rather than glossing over the problem by not correcting spelling mistakes.

And yes, we do correct every behavioural issue that is age/character appropriate in this household. So we expect certain behaviours of my 12 year old stepson, others of my 10 year old stepson and others of my 3 year old daughter.

It's cruel and misguided to have low expectations of children. Most children are capable of so much more than is expected of them.

I don't correct every spelling. And I mark to my lesson objective which may mean I also don't correct other errors...

I think that everyone wants them to leave primary school with a good grasp......me possibly most of all as I have to work with them in secndary

The question is how do we do this best?

Imagine you are cooking something for the very first time. Imagine that I am the worlds greatest chef, and I'm standing next to you (ha! ) You start to cook, and i stop you every few minutes, and endlessley nit pick. Will this make you enjoy the lesson? will you learn well, or will you eventually think, 'Oh fuck it, why bother?'

Would it be better that s/he chose specific things to correct this lesson, and finesse the rest at a later lesson? Wouldn't you get more out of the lesson that way?

When you correct evey mistake in the work, the kids switch off. It doesn't help them.

Anna - you could easily have 20 mistakes on a page if a child is stretching themselves with their writing, rather than just being safe. As I said with ds1, the language he is using in this piece of writing is way beyond what he may or may not have learned to spell - and he's having to try and work it out. Some words (like although) he asks me for, others he tries. I think 20 mistakes a page is highly likely tbh!

anna, I have exceptionally high standards. I'm also trained in how best to get the kids to reach them.

how sweet him remembering the bit about "disgusted by her rags..."!

I think my response was clouded today by all the negative things I was reading late last night on the Berlin school situation. All the serious papers had written how awful the schools are and that 20 percent of children in secondary schools cannot write a logical, grammatically correct sentence or spell, etc etc.

So I went off in a panic this morning and bought all these German "Teach your child dictation books" Sigh....

Anna8888 - what about phonetic spelling especially in the early years. I have girls who will write and write but they simply do not have the knowledge or experience to spell every word they want correctly. I don't want them to stop using this wonderfulyl rich vocab.

Ok, I've found the start of his writing. Bear in mind he is 6, not 7 till June, and he is a boy and finds writing quite hard. This is a page of his writing, as spelt by him.

"Onse a pon a time in a far away land thear livd a hamsum yong prins. He livd in a shining carsle. Although he had any thing his heart wontid he had no love in his heart. but one winter's night an old beger womne came to the carsle for shelter. Disgusted by her rags he tund her away. But she warned him not to be mean for beauty and when he mistook her again her ugliness melted away."

Now I know lots of that is from the film, but he has the confidence to use that sort of langauge in his writing, even though he can't spell it all. But if you corrected every mistake in red pen, he wouldn't try that hard again, he would stick to easy words. And probably be discouraged from writing anything ever again.

first step is actually knowing ambitious vocab (through reading, conversation etc), second step is wanting ( and feeling confident enough) to use ambitious vocab, third step is securing the spelling of ambitious vocab. Plenty of children will have 20 + spelling errors on a piece of work if they are confident, enjoying writing and not worried about making a mistake.

martianbishop - then we'll just have to disagree. I will never be convinced that it helps children not to learn to spell correctly as soon as possible.

BTW, in the bilingual school that my daughter goes to they are exceedingly hot on spelling and grammar since the children are expected to be proficient in both French and English by the end of primary school and this is, obviously, a huge extra workload for the children. The school has lots of experience of this kind of teaching and gives very useful, constructive advice to parents to help prevent confusion.

TS, I want to hug your son to bits!!!!

tortoiseshll, that is great I would have corrected 'wanted' and 'lived' and poited out the common ending 'ed'. I would then have chosen one of the more ambitious words, made a point about how good a word it was to use, and given him the correct spelling and said something along the lines of 'what a great word to use, I can't wait for you to use it in your next story'.

tortoiseshell he is really very young still. I wouldn't go overboard correcting work of a dc that age either. But in the later stages of primary, I think I would want it corrected IYSWIM.

Dd is 7 and loves writing. I really have to laugh wondering where the ideas come from at times but despite the vocabulary and the imagination which is impressive at times, she'll do things like write "a" as "are", eg, "I went to are circus". That's the kind of thing I point out to her at this age. Obviously I don't bother correcting words like "handsome" either. I'd imagine though, those would be the kind of mistakes the teachers would choose to correct too

Infact i am lowering standards as I have just written in report - I would like to see her more willing to try words out and less caught up in getting the correct spellings.

cazzybabs - why would correcting spelling prevent them using the rich vocabulary? As long as you reward them for using the rich vocabulary rather than penalise them for the incorrect spelling they should continue to use the rich vocabulary.

I really like that twinkle.

Anna I think there is a phase that children go through when they do spell lots of word incorrectly. My DS (nearly 7) does spell some words phonetically still, that shouldn't be, and he is an excellent speller who flies through his spelling tests (only 1 wrong all term). A year ago that would have been more pronounced.

mb and twinkle - I think that is what we did actually, we looked at a couple of similar words.

Anna - I think it's because if a child works really hard at something and it comes back covered in red pen, it's really demoralising and saps confidence. And it's that first visual glance at the work - a child could look and then say 'I got it all wrong' when in fact it was a great piece of work with quite a lot of spelling mistakes.

Well, I've definitely learned something this morning. When I read the original post I was in complete agreement with the OP, but having read the subsequent posts, particularly from MB, I am going to change my attitude with DD1. She has recently started at a new school and she showed me an essay she had written last week, which was excellent and she had received a very good mark for it. I was surprised though that they had not corrected all of her spelling errors and I pointed these out to her. I should add I did give her a lot of positive feedback too. So, it's possible the school has this same marking system. I will continue to emphasise that I consider spelling to be an important skill but I will bear these comments in mind.
PS I am still in shock that the school made such a basic error in their letter. Were they being ironic do you think?

twinkle - I take it you are a teacher? You sound very like ds1's teacher from last year who was so lovely!

eg he spelt force, forse - but that is just something that has to be learnt - we have morse, course etc that sound the same but are not spelt the same.