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?!?!?

Blu - sure, good teaching is about meeting the needs of individual children.

But I still don't think that any but very poor spellers (eg dyslexics) ought ever to be in the habit of producing pages of written work with 20 spelling mistakes per page that systematically go uncorrected, in a gentle, polite fashion. You don't have cover a page in red ink to correct it.

sorry, a bit of that post disappeared.

"Correction can be done in a gentle, polite, fashion."

Anna - even at 'emergent writing' stage?
I agree with you once they have become more familiar with writng, but not before. Sometimes EVERY word in DS's writing has wrong / inventive / phonic spelling.

I believe that in some Continental European countries where children start academic schooling much later, they do not even attempt creative writing until all the building blocks (including spelling) are in place. Likewise there is no place for 'the child as artist'. I have attended many International conferences on children's involvement with the arts, and German practitioners, for e.g, were adamant that children cannot be creative musicians - that is a job for adult professionals who have learned all the craft. Children can start learning all the technical skills but are not encouraged to involve creative experimentation because they will get it 'wrong'.

I would never downplay the importance of developing top standard 'craft' but do not believe that it needs to be at the expense of creativity.

Basic grammar should be taught at schools.

I was not taught English grammar at school and subsequently found it difficult to learn to speak and write German. I had to buy an English grammar book that explained the fundamentals before I could begin to try to understand the more complicated German grammar.

Oh, so grammar is not taught in Ireland either? But(and correct me if I'm wrong) don't all/most schools in Ireland teach Irish from a very early age too, so maybe the grammar is taught there? I used to have a lot of Irish friends and most of them were far more articulate than their English contemporaries, so I just presumed the education was better.

Anna - agree totally about it being necessary to grasp a language in its entirety in order to express oneself well. The analogy I was taught is that you can't build a beautiful palace if you don't know the basics of construction. I also agree with the person who said that words going uncorrected will just enforce the idea that they're correct and demoralise more at a later stage when they're told that no, they'd been writing rubbish all along.

I agree that grammar is useful for learning other languages kinder - maybe the fact that many children don't learn other languages in the UK is reflected in the fact that grammar isn't such a big deal. But I think many people cope in English with the bare minimum.

blu
I absolutely agree with you about the importance of creativity. Have you seen the Ken Robinson speech about creativity? I found it wonderful, very thought provoking

Basically, I believe that when learning the language (or in fact, any skill), we should be more concerned with creativity and less concerned with accuracy. There is plenty of time to correct mistakes later, if the child is encouraged to carry on.

The sad thing is, English is such a beautiful and rich language and used correctly lends itself well to the most creative self-expression. Not enforcing the teaching of grammar and correct spelling is tantamount to vandalism.

Where can i find that, Kinder? No - I should have read it, but haven't!

I think good teaching is about structures and stages, and that red-peenning, or even polite correction, at emergent writing stage is counter-productive.

But appropriate later on.

Most people seem not to be discriminating between emergent writing and later stages. I am intersted to know if hk78's school have adopted the same policy as DS's school, and that it refers to KS1 only. Just because we had the same info at the same time.

At what stage is mistake correction carried out, though? I see a lot of people leaving school completely unable to spell, so have obviously never been corrected.

wouldn't like to generalise too widely on the differences between the UK and continental Europe but obviously with highly inflexed languages, you have to learn the grammar in order to write the language. There is no way around it.

Think too language reflects national character a great deal. If the English approach is sort of muddling through and most of the time it works out ok, it seems to work the same way with the use of grammar. The German approach is to get things right, do things THE right way, applied to language this means the grammatical building blocks have to be there.

If anyone knows how to teach German, it will be the Germans so I expect their approach is the right one for their language. It maybe doesn't transmit so well to English and v.v. though

As to the necessity of grammar being [if I were Latin, I could have put that "being" in the optative & miss out "the necessity of". Sigh] a part of the curriculum, utterly totally agree.

SSandy, the Italians muddle through too, but still know their grammar.

"Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status" Ken Robinson.

If you have a spare 20 mins, watch this video.

But you know, I was not taught grammar is any depth at school. I took English at A level and then degree level. I am fairly articulate.

But I think it comes down to my reading widely as a child. I loved the classics. I do think that makes a greater difference than any amount of teaching. Added to the spoken English that you hear around you.

agree absolutely that grammatical understanding should be one aim of the curriculum. Think it's part of general knowledge really

SSSandy - yes - and English has so many variations from strict phonetics that it would be very unreasonable to expect a small child to get it all right early on. As I understand it German is more predicatble, spelling-wise. But I think it is a philosophically different approach to the process of learning, too.

KS - Thank you

Actually Orm, I must agree with you. I spent most of my infancy and youth with my nose in a book and am certain that I learned a lot more there than at school.

another thing that bugs me is how badly music was taught at school in my day as if it were just some airy fairy thing that doesn't matter much. A bit of this, a bit of that.

I find they teach it so much better in Germany. Dc can sing, they can read music, they can hear a wrong note and so on. Dd is always telling me, that wasn't a "c" mummy, you should sing it like this, etc... I just think that is all basic stuff that every dc without a hearing problem should have mastered at school.

Oh well.... The truth is I am so that I never learnt to sing properly. I would love to be able to

SSSandy2 - I agree that different languages need to be taught in different ways. Children also acquire their mother-tongue in different ways - for example, when mother-tongue English children are learning to speak, most of their first words are nouns - dog, cat, ball etc. When French children are learning to speak, most of their first words are verbs - tiens, viens, donne.

Which gives interesting combinations initially when children are being brought up bilingually - "donne ball". But they quickly (between 2 and 3) learn to distinguish and differentiate.

Yes, yes, yes. Reading, reading anything, from as early as possible, is the key to better use of language.

Why don't more schools and parents see this? At the risk of sounding really old and dull, I blame the rise of the DVD and the playstation ...

When I mark writing I focus on the objective of the lesson (e.g. to use paragraphs) and on the individual targets for improvement that the children have, based on their last piece of work. I don't mark spellings unless I notice that a child is consistently making a particular mistake e.g. using 'i' instead of 'I', using 't' for words ending in 'ed' (lookt, jumpt,) using suffixes incorrectly etc. This tends to be usually with the more able children who are able to take more information on board and I try to talk this through with individual children.
Research shows that children who are not worried about spelling mistakes write more confidently creatively. Children who do worry about spelling mistakes develop strategies to mask this e.g only choosing words they know they can spell, making their writing very small and ilegible.

That's fascinating Anna, I didn't know that