Reception report shock bad grades

[Cons]

My DS1 brought home his first graded school report, mainly 5's or 6's. I thought this was fine until I compared it to his friend's reports, mainly 8's some 9's, I was horrified. My husband and I are very academically minded, we both have masters degrees and believe wholeheartedly in the importance of education. What are we doing wrong? We are devastated by this report as it is the first time he has been 'graded' At home it is hard to get him to do his homework, he is not interested at all in reading, writing, maths etc. He would rather be playing. I thought this was the normal behaviour of a 5 year old boy but thought he was doing OK at school, which he obviously isn't. Should we get a tutor? It seems a bit ridiculous when he is so young but I don't want him to get even further behind next year. Are our expectations too high??

After reading this thread I feel really encouraged that I'm (we're) doing the right thing with the children. My boys just got their reports back and they got average scores. I was gutted I know they are better than that but they are 6 & 5. There are many more years for them to prove themselves and even if they don't I will have to except that!. It will not make me love them any less. I want them and my other children to be good people, confident, motivated and determined. Academics alone will get you no where unless you have drive.

Not every spot on every report card for kindergarten is necessarily filled out. My DCs' teachers focused on the sections on the far right, the section with Learning Skills at the top, and the Art, PE and Music section. Additionally, the reading, social studies, science and maths skills sections feature spaces for an assessment only for some of the quarters. 'Accurately prints name' is assessed for all 4 quarters. 'Blends sounds to read one-syllable decodable words' is assessed for the final two quarters. And Kindergarten is for 5-6 year olds, who for the most part do not have to do homework of any kind during the kindergarten year.

The grading scale is 1 to 3+, which is entirely sufficient for this age group, given the fact that most 'academic' progress for the age group depends on biological/neurological attributes and factors not related to teacher input or child effort. It is a scale that is easy for parents to to understand: Exceeds standards, Meets standards, Getting there and Not making progress are a far cry from the panoply of skill and development sets in the EYFS consider Emotional Development, Scale Point #8 on the EYFS: 'understands what is right and what is wrong and why' and yet world peace is still a chimera? By contrast, for the purposes of school performance, the assessed skills under the headings Learning Skills, Learning Behaviours, Co-operation and Rules and Procedures are going to tell you all you need to know about your child in the classroom setting.

When a parent is faced with a rubric such as the EYFS, with such minute and detailed points assessed, they might be forgiven for thinking a teacher had really taken the time to analyse their child, and really done it in a completely objective way, as opposed to Redskyatnight's very apt description of the reports of her two DCs. 'Displays a strong and positive sense of self identity and is able to express a range of emotions fluently and appropriately' can be interpreted very subjectively by a teacher. (sheesh I have worked for people who would not get past that one. Expressing emotions fluently, and self-identity, yes; appropriately, no. Range does enraged to ballistic count?)

Levels aa to C in the Fountas and Pinnell scheme are for pre-reading to early emergent readers. Materials and the classroom focus support pre-reading skills to basic blending. Again, this is for 5 year olds at the youngest, not for 4 year olds as in the UK.

Blending sounds (and the other optional KDG targets) is to reading as picking up a fork is to eating. Not entirely necessary for everyone, a precursor to the real action. For the most part, reading, including basic segmenting, blending, decoding and Dolch words/sight words are the work of 1st grade (age 6-7).

But Zola how do you know they are better than that?

Are you trainined in assessing early years?

I am still completely in the dark as to the existence of grades for Reception - I have two children who have done Reception 09/10 and 10/11 and no grading system has ever been mentioned or included in their reports.

Is this a nationwide thing, part of the curriculum, because our school does not use it at all!

Gratious mathanxiety the EYFs has far less detail than that report card you linked to and parents should be provided with a summary of their child's achievements ( not a report card ) which usually consists of an annotated photo album type document with comments such as xxxxx enjoyed exploring the rock pools when we visited the beach and he used natural materials to make this lovely sculpture ... not a tick list or tests levels.

AnonymousBird yes it is a national system which all schools must follow (since 1999) It sounds as if your school is using it as it is intended and not giving parents meaningless numbers.

MRZ Im sure i read on another thread a post by a primary teacher who said schools are supposed to provide a copy of gradings, reguardless anyway if this is data held about your child you have the right to access it.

Are we reading the same links, Mrz? There is absolutely no way the EYFS document, so extravagantly wordy ('Talks & listens confidently & with control, consistently showing awareness of the listener by including relevant detail. Uses language to work out & clarify ideas showing control of a range of appropriate vocabulary') and schematic, compares to the simplicity of the Cobb county sample.

I think most parents are not interested in some souvenir of their child's year in school. They can probably remember it all, blow by blow, anyhow.

A simple tick in the boxes along with comments related to actual progress or lack thereof is what most are interested in, without all the fuzzy stuff like this 'Uses talk to organise, sequence & clarify thinking, ideas, feelings & events, exploring the meanings & sounds of new words' that might leave a lot of parents scratching their heads.

namechange100 if you read it then the person was misinformed the statutory requirement is for the school to provide a summary. Parents can request to see a copy of the profile if they wish.

Obviously you aren't looking at the correct document mathanxiety Perhaps that is where your problem arises?

Parents are actually very sentimental and love their child's book of memories that they weren't there to share.

Thanks Mrz - I have been completely blissfully ignorant of the existence of this system these past two Reception years. I am quite pleased that I have - these children are only 5 (barely 5 in some cases) and frankly, the fact that my two have been able to read at the end of the year has been a pleasant bonus. All I wanted was for them to settle in, be sociable and generally have a good time and feel positive and excited about school (which they both are!).

phew, will post "grades for five year olds" nonsense at the back of my brain in the bin.

Just one more darn thing to find a place for and dust imo. Don't get me wrong, I still have most of the little books of laminated photos that mine received, but they were the icing on the cake. If I thought the teachers had spent more time compiling the souvenirs than carefully assessing my DCs and producing the individual reports I would be horrified.

Out of interest as a parent AnonymousBird would you prefer a photo record of your child's experience or a tick list?

BY carefully assessing do you mean testing mathanxiety?

We got a lovely book from my daughter's preschool at the end of this year. It contains absolutely no mention of grades and barely any of numbers (apart from to note that she knows some, accompanied by a lovely photo of her hopping along a line of them). It is a beautiful record of her time at preschool and most especially of her friends there as there are some lovely photographs of them playing together and notes about the kinds of games they made up together. There are scanned copies of her writing and artwork and one of the things she enjoyed most about looking at it was to see how much her pictures have improved since she started there. I imagine it has served its intended purpose - to encourage her by showing her how far she has come in only one short year and to give us a snapshot of her life away from her parents. Obviously this is preschool and not reception, but I would be very very happy to receive something similar at the end of next year. It's worth a million formal reports.

No, I don't mean testing. I mean forming an opinion over the period included in the report, which indicates that the teacher really knows my child and has taken time with him or her individually to build up a realistic impression of his or her strengths or weaknesses.

Words that come from that sort of continuous interaction and careful observation are worth a million pictures imo (which in the case of my DCs' school were often taken by parent volunteers on trips and by the TA in the classroom)

My DD (not yet 5) has just finished reception. We got a one page report highlighting the key areas and how DD was doing (from memory things like 'DD has good social skills and gets on well with friends', 'DD has a strength in numeracy', 'DD needs to work on concentration in group work). There were no grades mentioned thank god.

These are small children. They have their whole life ahead of them to be measured and pushed to achieve. Chill out OP and enjoy the summer holidays.

we had grades a b c. A for ahead of expectation, b for in line with expectation, c for work to be done in the area. This covered language skills reading writing, numeracy, PE and dance, knowledge of the world. But the longest part of the report was on social development and that was obviously not marked. The comments in our case were all accurate and a very good view of our son as he is at school and home. It's all good.

Namechange100 - I am not trained in early years but I can see that they can achieve better. At the same time, I want my children to be children and will not push them right now because they are still so young and are boys. ( Boys tend to be late developers). On the continent children go to school between the ages of 6 and 7 and studies have shown that they don't any worse than english children at a comparable age. Whilst I want my children to well academically I am well aware that at 5 they have another 11 years at school. The more confident they are the better. For boys of my children's age confidence can be gain in much more physical pursuits (not all boys) i.e learning to ride a bike without stabilizers, adventure playground, scootering, playing team games etc.

Also, I am a firm believer in trusting your instincts. We have become a society who are beholden to experts to tell us how we feel and what we should be doing. I think there is a time and place for that but I definitely believe in my good old gut feelings.

My ds1 is summer-born. He was a slow starter at primary school and it wasn't until Y5 that he started to really shine. Before that he was fairly average in his achievements. He's now just finishing Y8 and is predicted to get As/A*s at GCSE in most subjects. I think it just takes the younger ones a while to catch up.

Zola I did wonder how you can dispute a grading if you dont have the grading criteria and how to apply it.

In your latter post I think you have described a very healthy attitude. I have celebrated my DS achievement and he did get above average grades BUT as a secondary school teacher I have witnessed young people go down and up in their attainment over the space of two years, you are quite right about time etc.

IMO if anyone can get DC's through GCSES keeping them stable, confident with a PMA towards life and education this served them very well.

FWIW i dont think anyone should consider tuition until secondary school if needed in a core subject or if trying for grammar entry - even the latter can be done too early leading to early burnout or over coaching.

So you mean like the Foundation Stage Profile then mathanxiety?

Fountas and Pinnell Reading Level = guided reading levels based on reading recovery ... interesting

Mrz - we got a full detailed typed personalised report which was wonderful and clearly not cut and paste at all as it was so specific to our children and their relevant skills/strengths/weaknesses. We also got a large folder of their work, some of which had photos and comments of things that had happened during the year, which is absolutely lovely.

I cannot see what use a tick list would be, ticks are either there or not, there is no in between or half way house (presumably) and don't demonstrate any effort on the part of the school to cater for and acknowledge the individual needs of the child (which our school is unbelievably good at).

God, I had no idea this bizarre bureaucracy was all out there... I am so glad our school does things the way they do!

You could be a friend of mine with a son in my ds1's class. She and her husband are both very academic, though not pushy, and they are struggling hard to accept that their son is perfectly average and normal, and is also a little bit immature for his age to boot. They just want the best for him, and for him to try his best. But his best is different to the rest the class, he does try but he simply isn't working (and indeed can't work) at the same level as the rest of the class. I've seen the profile scores for the class in passing, and it seems to a high scoring cohort from what's been said on this thread so far. I could see that most of the class were getting 8's & 9's throughout, a small handful were getting 7's, and there was one run of 4's and 5's. I now know, because she's told me herself, that this was her son. He is a lovely, unique, happy little boy, and whether he has any particular learning issues is currently being looked at, and if that's the case they will do whatever they can to try and get him the appropriate help. But emotionally they are struggling to accept it, and she is adamant that the school simply don't get him, that they don't understand him and don't make enough allowances for him. I don't know whether that's the case but I feel so much for her.

My DCs did SP, in 1st grade, albeit after they had all picked up reading by themselves, not Fountas and Pinnell/ reading recovery/ guided reading. I second your there. Again, the report sample I linked to was for one particular county, a long way from where we lived. The reports my DCs received in kdg made no mention of any reading series or scheme. In fact, reports from then on didn't refer to any particular series either. As I said, the teachers' focus in kdg was on classroom behaviour, learning skills, interaction with peers, self care, art, music, PE (basic acclimatisation to school) with the comments section (and another page stapled on usually) reserved for analysis of the more academic side of their progress, with the boxes containing the numbered assessments. IIRC, there was a shorthand way to denote effort too, four categories all through the grades.

Thanks to the fact that teachers were available for a chat any time at the school door or by phone or email (you were guaranteed a return call or email within 24 hours) any concerns could be dealt with as they came up and problems were not left to fester. The report for each quarter was actually not really necessary.

I was very pleased that their school didn't test in class until they reached 5th grade (age 10 or so), except for a battery of tests administered every two years (1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th grades -- Terra Nova test) that were used by the archdiocese and the school for curriculum tweaking.