How much 'formal' learning do you do at home with your Year 1/2/3 DCs?

[TheIIlusiveShadow]

I feel like the most neglectful parent on the planet!

We listen to the reading, learn the spellings and have a positive parental attitude to school. That's it.

Have just picked my jaw off the ground, turns out DS's friends have been going through workbooks, computer tutoring and even photocopying homework worksheets from the other local school.

How do the teachers feel about this - do the kids come in inspired, confused or bored?
As parents did you get more 'involved' as they get older?

Teachers set little homework at this stage because they expect the children to be broadening their learning with activities such as cooking, crafts, playing, going on walks and reading books.

I would love it if parents helped to improve their children's social skills too. I find it frustrating the number of children who don't know how to play a simple game such as Snakes and Ladders or who constantly interrupt adults when they are talking.

I sometimes suggest these things to parents but all they want is a worksheet to do with the children - it's just so much less effort for them.

MollieO - I think lots of professional people are constantly switched on to learning things to feed into their working lives, even when outside the office.

DP complains about the members of his team who never seem to learn anything new to input to their working lives outside office hours... and generally ends up getting rid of them, one way or another!

Constant interrupting can be a battle. I try specialgun, I try!!

At this age, the children should be learning how to climb a tree, the best way to roll down a grassy hill, how to play in a park without their parents constantly hovering over them (that's social skills as well as physical). I'd also throw in learning to swim, and, maybe for some, learning a musical instrument - from Junior age rather than before - and going along to Rainbows or Beavers to mix with a whole different bunch of children and learn a whole different bunch of skills from those they have to spend 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, at school, doing. Extend and broaden the horizons rather than adding more of the same.

I would come under the op's umbrella of 'neglectful'. My ds [6] loves school but apart from reading is a boy who sees 'work' for school- fine imo.
He would lose his joy for school if I unwisely tried to 'hothouse' him.

Mine are in Ys 2 and 3.

All 3 of mine have been very fluent readers for a while and devour paperbacks (2 or 3 a week) in bed so I rarely hear them read now,maybe once a week,concentrating on comprehension.Feeling a bit bad now.

I do however do their 2X homework a week.

If anything crops up that I feel they're a bit weak on I may do the odd bit.Eg dtwin 1 (8) I feel needs to improve on his phonics spelling so I get him to write a couple of sentences 3 or 4 X weekly but it takes literally 10 mins.

DD was a tad shaking on subtraction so we worked through a workbook during a couple of weekends.Think I did a bit of joined writing with one twin because he asked and some letter formation with my left hander a couple of years ago.I am an ex teacher though so kind of know when the odd thing needs attention.

I would never do anything just because though. Having said that they all had mini pop up story book kits for Christmas which they did this week and really enjoyed,obviously the odd bit of spelling was discussed.

But why do people feel the need to supplement school work? Why do they not trust the school they have chosen to teach their children? Why do they think that their child wants or needs to have spent 6 hours at school only to come home and have to do it all again? Certainly talk to your children about what they have been doing in school, and maybe ask them to show you what they have been doing,and you can maybe try a littl help if they seem stuck, but don't assume that using workbooks etc is going to do them any favours, especially if the methods used are different to what they are learning currently in school. It's a very well saying "Oh, I've taught my child how to do long division (or whatever)!" if school is building up to it, and making sure they all understand place value ,or use repeated addition and subtraction etc. What I am trying to say is, just because you wonder what the point is, or something seems "easy" , doesn't mean that school is not doing what it should be. Just remember , you are an adult now, and, (hopefully) understand how to do the things that your children are seeing for the first time!

I think if you really don't trust schools, then maybe you should be home-schooling them?

I guess I must be unique in preferring my work life to stay in my office at work rather than impinging on my home life. Ironically the sort of job I have means that doesn't always happen. As a lawyer I have to give advice, write opinions, research the law. Weirdly I don't feel compelled to do any of that in my own time unless I have to (which I have had to this evening, sadly).

I think there is a big difference between encouraging a love of learning and making children sit down and do worksheets, as some on this thread admit to. Tomorrow ds will be having a physics lesson in our local car showrooms . Not a worksheet in sight.

I don't think every child glides through everything from 4- 16. Things will crop up that will benefit from extra attention.

My left hander would still be forming letters incorrectly and my dd would have still not felt confident with subtraction and hated it if I hadn't done a bit extra.Yes they would have got there eventually but at what cost?Dd would have had zero confidence at maths and dtwin1 would be struggling with writing which would have held him back in other areas.

Totally disagree with just sitting back and trusting school,that's ok to a certain degree but all children differ,children can get overlooked and extra attention at home can help if needed.Why anybody wouldn't help their child on principle is beyond me.

DD1 in Y2: We read together every night, she usually reads a chapter of whatever she is enjoying, I then read to her either from the same book or another we might have on the go, Matilda tonight! She has school homework, weekly which I supervise but she does it by herself usually. Other than that I do very little except talk with her about anything she shows an interest in, show her the world and leave her to have lots of free time to play with her sister and her friends without structure.

DD2 in Y1: We read together daily (school book and her free choice), we do sentence work a couple of times a week and she is mad on number problems so we play shops, use a few maths games online and I encourage her to write for purposes during her play, ie cards, lists, menus etc...

No worksheets here, but lots of things to improve exisisting skills and itroduce new skills and ideas.

No worksheets here either, but I do extra work.
Dd has excelent teachers and the school is a good one. However, with 35 in a class I just can't see how she'll reach her potential.
When the intake of top universities reflects the proportion of children educated in the state system, I'll have more trust in state education.

We just did what school expected until end of Y1 (spellings, reading).
Then I noticed DS was behind in maths and we started with 2 little maths sessions a day. So now we read and do 10 min maths in the morning and in the evening we do spellings and 10 min maths and the occasional HW at the weekend. That's more than enough for an almost 7 yo Y2 boy.

I just hope I don't find out he is behind anywhere else at the end of the year!

We do pretty much the same as you OP and we visit museums and national trust properties, etc. ds1 is 6. They have been studying Lowry recently and because we live in east manchester we went for a look at his gallery yesterday. Why bog young kids down with pressure at this age.

FYI competitive parenting is Alive and well here too.

We do maths worksheets, computer games or silly chasing games. I usually tell him that we need to do 2 or 3 little things and that may be practicing a times table, 3 additions on a worksheet and a computer game e.g. telling the time or giving change.

Of course, we go to places and do all sorts of things DC are interested in.

I have a year 3 and a reception child. We do the usual reading, spellings and homework for ds1, reading for reception. They play mathletics, but we don't do any other formal work, but we talk talk talk and read, about every topic they have. Far more fun than working through worksheets.

Dd did a home based early intervention programme from being 18 months old so "worked" about 30 hours per week from her earliest days. She didn't do standard school hours in school until the term before she started y1 so up until then she did a lot of work at home. Once in school full time I'd just reinforce stuff, not the academics though things like sharing, holding a conversation, playing games. Now she's year four she reads whatever she wants every day sometimes to me sometimes to herself. Her spellings she memorises as they are handed to her so we never learn spellings. She has a maths sheet once a week that she completes herself without my assistance. She does like to read around the topics they do in school so will search for info on the internet or will find books from the library for that purpose.
I suppose I do the bare minimum with her myself but she does expand her knowledge herself with little input from anyone tbh.

We dutifully do the homework set for DS1 (Y3) at the weekend and I will sit with him and make him complete classwork he's refused to even attempt in school (he has ASD and ADHD, is extremely demand avoidant and finds the school environment very stressful, so this is common!)

We do have a pile of workbooks because, just occasionally, he gets an urge to do them, binge on them, but won't let me get involved. He's way ahead of his class in maths, but refuses extension work at school, so I take the opportunity to work out where he's at and what he's not quite grasping and give him to opportunity, informally over the next week or so to refine his understanding and practice in real situations.

I refuse point blank to enroll tutors and have him do anything extra at home other than purely for the sake of enjoyment, though. He's 8, ffs!

Deeply agree with PeaceLoveAndCandy on her view about actual limited amount of academic content of school day. There are only so many hours in a school day and I would suspect only 3 of them are dedicated to learning opportunities in the sense of reading, writing and arithmatic.

Although I agree specialgun that children should play games, be social, learn to swim, climb trees, chase butterflies, etc... I would add that my children do this a lot. We just watch less tv and play less video games (or steer them to education games like BBC Bitesize).

What concerns me is at least at our school they dealt with not being able to read well or understand subtraction by

1. not informing parents of difficulty in mastering the skill
2. not making it clear to child or parent that they need to work on this problem
3. not suggesting pragmatic things parents could do at home to help (traditional board games - i.e. snakes and ladders played backwards to practice simple subtractions up to -6, on-line free games, especiall BBC bitesize games, card games, etc...)
4. refusing to recommend workbooks or websites
5. and dealing with the problem by simply moving the DC down a group, not giving them any work in the area they struggle and passing the problem on to the next teacher (who often deals with it in a similar way).
6. regularly offering little or no maths homework - at least not until late Y3 when OFSTED sent the letter that they'd be inspecting in the near future.

I could write a short novel here about our struggles - I am still FURIOUS about how the school has handled my DD1. It was easier for the head to declare to me that what I needed to understand was DD1 "just wasn't that bright" than to deal with the fact that DD1 was confused by all the different methods she'd be shown (a typical problem fro middle and low attainers according to the Vorderman report on mathematics: www.tsm-resources.com/pdf/VordermanMathsReport.pdf). DD1 just simply didn't get subtraction at first - they didn't take time out to see what the problem was and work with her. They just dropped this work from her tuition.

I don't feel I'm teacher bashing here (although I have had a bad experience) - I really don't care how a teacher wants to go about teaching maths and helping a child understand. I want to see it work.

As a parent I simply want my child to add, subtract, multiply and divide with flair. If they have good ability with fractions, proportions, presentation of data and can do a bit of geometry and early algebra to boot - fantastic. But I feel strongly they need these basic maths skills for life and to fully access learning in senior school.

Welcome back after half-term.

Thank you for all your posts.
Lot's to think about. Hand writing practice is something we could do more of .

Like PastSellbyDate our school never points out areas we could work on and our annual report is always positively glowing. However we knew the in Year1 for example number bonds were weak so we played lots of games. We have certainly missed stuff a bit of practice would have helped, thing is we don't really know what goes on at school day by day.

I'm probably a terribly pushy mum. DD1 is 4 and in reception and DD2 is 2 and at nursery.

We have an "activity sheet box" which is a box file with various sheets I have printed off the internet or photocopied from home education books, as well as colouring sheets etc, and the box is always available to the girls, as well as a box of crayons and pens. DD2 loves to scribble on pictures of Bob or Thomas, although she does sometimes scribble on pictures of numbers or letters and recognises some of them. DD1 tends to choose more worksheety things, but she has the choice of colouring if she likes - I print off things that she likes so that she has the option.

They often choose the box, as me and DH are studying with the OU so they like to copy. I only "mark" the sheets if DD1 brings them to me and ask me to, and they are usually all right as they are easy ones. We have a wall where they can stick pictures, paintings and worksheets that they are proud of.

They also both have workbooks - for DD2 they are basically colouring books again, with things like shapes or animals that she likes to chunter on about. DD1 has more school like ones - her favourite atm is a science book as she likes doing the experiments. Again the workbooks are there as a choice for the girls, although I will sometimes get them out and suggest them if I think they are getting a bit hyper.

DD1 uses reading eggspress, although she is needing quite a bit of help atm as it was a big jump up from reading eggs (ie from phonics to parts of speech). They also both go on the cbeebies website.

Me, DH and other family members read to the girls quite a bit, and they have their own bookshelves to choose from, as well as a big cushion next to it to snuggle in. DD1 also likes to read by herself or to DD2, and me and her take turns with paragraphs reading the bedtime story.

Then of course there is the less formal stuff like horrible histories, dressing up, playing shops, newsround, here comes science, cooking, nature detectives, painting, gardening, arsing about with mirrors or plants or whatever and so on. Plus trips to museums, art galleries, playgroups, historical landmarks and so on.

The school homework gets done, but in about ten minutes, and the school reading books get read maybe twice in the week we have them, because there is only so many times you can coax a child away from reading proper interesting books to read about Biff and Chip getting new shoes. The teacher says that DD1 is having her reading assessed though, so hopefully we will get something a bit more interesting soon.

We kind of have a house that lends itself to what people would call formal learning, but I don't think that it is better or worse than any house with involved parents. Me and DH study, as well as reading, writing, following the news etc, and so does the wider family. I do, of course, think that both the DDs are little geniuses, but then doesn't everyone? :)

I should add that DD1 goes to Rainbows, DD2 to a lovely informal nursery and playgroups, they both go to the park and out on scooters (with supervision, due to being so little, but that generally consists of me drinking a brew and reading a book unless they actually fall off and start crying or go out of the boundaries that I have set). DD1 did go to football and gymnastics, but she didn't like them so stopped, and we are considering letting her start to learn cornet, as I come from a brass band family.

I also keep trying to get DD1 to talk to other kids, but she isn't a great fan of other children and tends to just stare at them and freak them out a bit, so I have been coaching her a bit and telling her some good stock phrases to use.

They also do things like dancing, forward rolls and jumping on the bed, making dens and suchlike, and each have a teddy that they adore and play elaborate games with. So it's not all sitting still :)

I think that any child's week would look massively busy if you laid it out like that.