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?!?!?

I also wonder if the letter is not outlining a 'change' in policy, but may be a response to a complaint from a parent that 'teachers weren't correcting their child's work'?

one of the first things I was taught as a music teacher was not to correct every little thing first time through - a teacher's role is not just to correct but to instil confidence and a love of the subject.

anna, it is almost universal trait in children to want to get things right. They would, if everything is corrected, much rather play it safe with a simple word, then risk a harder word and get it wrong.

I make the point, over and over again, that I would rather see them try to exceed expectations and make the odd cock up, than play it safe. But still I have children who would rather copy the 'right' answer from the child next to them, than try themselves, make a mistake, and learn in the process!

tortoiseshell - it doesn't need to be covered in red pen.

The teacher just needs to write out a list of the words the child has spelt incorrectly in their correct spelling at the end of the piece of work, and ask the child to learn the words for a spelling test.

This is what happened at my prep school years ago.

TS, yes I am a teacher, but currently on maternity leave. Reading your son's work has made me think fondly of teaching, and almost made me look forward to returning to work next year!

Actually I know I'm going off a bit on a tangent here... but one article I was reading last night was saying that creative writing in German schools had proved to be a failure. That through not correcting misspelt words, children had attained a lower level of written German and had effectively learnt to misspell; so it should be dropped from the German curriculum. I had the impression people find the whole idea of letting children write freely using words they cannot yet spell correctly very strange.

I think it had been adopted from English/American style teaching practices in an effort to improve literacy but they now say it doesn't work here so they want to return to the old practice of writing being reading comprehension questions and learning spelling/punctuation via dictation. I always hated the idea of dictation and the lack of creativity but really don't know what to think now.

True, but then the child may perceive that all they have got for their hard efforts is extra work. And how many teachers can do a personalised spelling test every week for 30 children? And the children who use the most adventurous vocabulary will find they have a ludicrous number of spellings to learn! I'd rather they spent the time reading some good books, where they are infusing the spellings from the book, and gradually correcting the written mistakes - so limiting it to 3 or 5 mistakes, and REALLY learning them, rather than cramming them for a test and not knowing them a week later, but being determined to only use easy language so as to avoid a spelling test.

I used to teach emergent writing and my dd is doing this at the moment - the whole goal is to make the child feel like a writer, to believe that they can write. So my dd happily writes, sounding out all the words she doesn't know with her phonics - sometimes they are correct and sometimes they aren't but I don't pick her up on the ones that aren't. As she learns more letter combinations her spelling will become more accurate and as she reads she will pick up the spellings of phonically irregular words (she can already manage "the" and "love" and some others).

I agree with MB and others - the policy that the school are adopting is standard in a many schools already. Also you have to think about what the aim of the writing is. If it it creative writing the aim is get them thinking imaginatively and using a story-like structure. If the lesson is about dictionary work then you would obviously be more concerned with spelling. If it were me I would probably concentrate on 3 spellings that were common words and that they should be getting right.

Another method is to tick each letter of the word that they got correct and dot the ones they didn't - then they can see that they were almost right, ifyswim - much less damaging to confidence - though I have to say that I would still only do this with a select number of mistakes.

I have had children in my class who would not even attempt to write because they were too hung up on spelling every word correctly.

Twinkle - I bet you are a lovely lovely teacher!

Anna, I'm afraid writng 20+ words in a spelling book for a test the following week does not really teach children how to spell.

I'm not a teacher so I appreciate I'm probably totally wrong.
The problem I have with this is, when I got a piece of work back from a teacher, if it wasn't marked as wrong, it was right. Would this not lead to a situation where the word is finally corrected, and the student thinks "I've been getting this right so far, what on earth is going on?"

He would be faced with this mammoth list though Anna which I know I would baulk at, so a child must too.

I remember Latin lessons and we were meant to learn this list each week - I was terrible at it. Faced with this whole list that I had to learn, I just couldn't get my head round it.

SPB does have a point though...

DS2 really struggles with his spelling (he's just about got his writing sorted, after years of hard work by both himself and the school). Sometimes I'm amazed that the teacher can actually read what he's trying to say, tbh.

There would be absolutely no point whatsoever for the teacher to correct every word he's got wrong because DS2 would just switch off.

Prior to him being at school, I would have expected every spelling to be corrected (DS1 is usually a good speller, and would react well to the corrections), but I know that it would totally demoralise DS2.

It would be great if all three of my children were perfect in every way academically, sadly that's not going to happen, and I appreciate how the teachers take such an individual approach to each pupil.

I do cringe when I see mistakes made by the staff though, especially in letters like this.

and effectivlt giving them extra homework is going to make them choose the easier word even more!

'Thank you for using such expressive language, now have some extra homework in the spelling mistakes'

Yes, I can see that one winning......with the boys in particular!

TS, thanks . I aim for 'happy children who aren't afraid to make mistakes'. Of course there are times when I'm sure the children think I'm a strict old bag too!

Message withdrawn

A battle I am having with dd atm is that she is a real perfectionist, and over-reacts TERRIBLY to getting anything wrong. She is 4 (August birthday), in reception, doing fantastically well. We were doing a puzzle together in her Noddy book, where you had to write the numbers from 10 to 1 down a rocket. She missed out 8. I VERY gently pointed this out to her, she threw a COMPLETE wobbly, floods of tears, went to bed(!), threw the book across the room, because she couldn't bear having got it wrong. I can imagine if she got work back with lots of corrections, now or in the future, it really would dent her confidence, and her response would be to simply not have a go. I know because it's how I was. So I am trying to model lots of 'getting things wrong, but having tried anyway' behaviour for her, because I don't think it's a healthy attitude. But a child like her who is very bright but perfectionist really needs to be encouraged to take a risk in writing etc.

I sent back a questionnaire to school with the grammar corrected

Doodledootoo - not so much posh as West Country! He says carrsel, I say cassel (from the NE!)

Flame....if you don't correct every single behaviorural mistake, do you think that you child will never learn them at a later date?

Or do yo pick some for now, and do others later?

DD just has an answer for everything - at the moment she has issues writing "w", so she does an "m" instead and tells you to turn it upside down

It was more the child being confused because you assume that if it isn't marked as being wrong at school, then it is right. Behaviour is more variable than spelling.

Although to be fair, when this starts from reception it isn't an issue because from that age it is all new anyway so it can be gradual.

I think I'm looking at it from the pov of if they are suddenly implementing the policy and 10yr olds etc.

I dunno. I like the idea, but can see both sides of the argument too iyswim.

The letter didn't say it was going to "lower standards" at all did it? It said it was changing its marking policy to one which does not penalise children who are less able able at spelling.

I gave some kids their assessment results yesterday. Most of them failed to get a C grade. However this was still an improved result over the last time.

Is there anyone who would think that the right thing to do in this situation, to help their motivation, was to go ever and point out every mistake?

The child that I praised the most was one who'd failed to get a C grade but had still done twice as well as she had done in the previous test. To go through every mistake with this girl would have belittled her and turned her off the subject. Next time, I hope she will get a C, but blasting her with her mistakes wouldn't help, it would hinder her

I wonder what the previous marking policy was? I would imagine that most teachers were already doing something similar to the 'new' method anyway.