spellings in reception???

[nononoyes]

DD2 has finished learning all the words that they send home and today she came out with spellings. Is this not abit much for a 4 year old? She can do them but i don't want her to feel pressured :( She said it was only her and another little girl who got them.

Will i look like an idiot if i say something to the teacher?

Does she feel pressured. If you think it's too much for her speak to her teacher but if she's happy then go with the flow. Ds has had 24 spelling words now and appears to learn them easily and be quite happy so I'm not worried.

Just bear in mind that learning spelling words has been shown to have no impact at all on how good they turn out to be at spelling!

seeker - that's a myth!

Here's the thing, Nononoyes: what is critical to spelling ability is that it should move hand-in-hand with what is taught in the phonics lesson. If children have learnt the sound-spellings 'a', 'i', 'm', 's', 't', 'n' 'o' 'p', for example, and they have learned to blend and segment sounds in words containing these combinations (mat, sat, sit, pit, top, and so on), they can be expected to have a go at spelling them.
Of course, as I've pointed out on this forum before, reading is easier than spelling because reading involves recognition memory; whereas spelling involves recall memory.
However, sending random spellings home or sending spellings home that children have never learnt before is just plain daft because, in those instances, the research evidence is that even when parents drill their dearly beloveds night after night for a week and the children then get ten out of ten in the test, after a couple of weeks it doesn't transfer to their reading or writing.

''learning spelling words has been shown to have no impact at all on how good they turn out to be at spelling''

It depends how they are learnt. The research shows that there are six activities that make no difference whatsoever to reading and spelling success, and two activities which are actually related to worse reading and spelling achievement. One of the six activities is ?sight word learning? (learning to recognise whole words as units without sounding out). So, if children are given lists of HFW spellings to memorise by sight -unrelated to the GPCs they've covered in class (see SoundsWrite's post above) then seeker is correct.

Maverick - which two make it worse? Just curious.

''The two activities that resulted in worse achievement were: ?non-literacy activities? (such as play, drawing, colouring, crafts), and ?oral vocabulary? (language development, story discussions, show and tell, teacher instructions).''

Here are the 2 studies, Sittinginthesun:

''One remarkable study conducted in 1985 by Carr and Evans in Canada showed this by recording ?time on task? for each individual child on 50 occasions per child over several months. They then correlated ?time on task? with each child?s reading-test score. They found that ?ONLY three activities were positively and significantly correlated to reading skill: that is, the more time spent on these activities the higher the reading scores were. These are: practice segmenting and blending sounds in words (phonemes), specific phonics activities such as learning letter-sound relationships, and writing words, phrases and sentences, by copying or from memory?. The memorizing of sight words, lessons on vocabulary and grammar and listening to the teacher read showed strong negative correlations to reading scores ? in other words, the more time children spent on these activities, the poorer their reading test scores were.'' www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=173&n_issueNumber=59 These findings have been replicated by others -see 'Sumbler and Willows' study, below

''Interestingly, it was found that out of these ten activities, only two were highly correlated with success in reading and spelling. These two were: ?phonics? (which included all phonics activities involving print, letter-sound correspondences, blending, segmenting, detecting sounds in words all with printed form of the word), and ?letter formation? (which involved talking about the shapes of letters, writing letters and words in context of learning letter-sound relationships). These were the only activities that mattered in terms of subsequent reading and spelling performance. However, equally important was the finding that six activities made no difference whatsoever to reading and spelling success, and two activities were actually related to worse reading and spelling achievement. The six activities that made no difference were: ?Auditory phonological awareness? (in the absence of print), ?sight word learning? (learning to recognise whole words as units without sounding out), ?reading/grammar? (grammar or punctuation explanations, reading by children that appeared to be real reading usually with the teacher), ?concepts of print? (learning about reading, chanting pattern books), ?real writing? (included any attempts to write text), ?letter name learning? (included only the learning of letter names, not sounds). The two activities that resulted in worse achievement were: ?non-literacy activities? (such as play, drawing, colouring, crafts), and ?oral vocabulary? (language development, story discussions, show and tell, teacher instructions).''
rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=34&n_issueNumber=46

Why not just turn them into a game and then leave it like that?

maverick - that link made very interesting reading. It is unfortunate, however, that this paragraph is included within it:

"This means that poor decoding (the definition of ?dyslexia? in the UK and US) cannot be attributed to ?some type of ?brain disorder? or faulty gene?. Instead, the cause is the nature of the English alphabet code and how it is taught."

An assertion about the nature of dyslexia that is now scientifically disproved (it is a neurological disorder) detracts rather from the validity of all the other arguments.

Is she learning them for a test? DS has had words to practice spelling/handwriting for a while, but as far as I am aware he isn't tested on them.
At the moment he is also being given a list of words and then he has to write down words that rhyme with them. Good practice for learning which phonic spelling he needs in different words.

I don't get why this is a problem. You send your dc to school to learn stuff, most importantly the 3 Rs. You put this learning in the hands of the qualified teacher. Your DD's class teacher clearly thinks she's ready for a few spellings, so trust her judgement. If she can't do it, she will spell her words incorrectly and the teacher will take a step back... or put in some strategy to help her learn her spellings. It's really not "a bit much." It's what she's there for.

Agapanthii - do you always put blind trust in the people you outsource your life to, or do you try to understand what is going on?

nononoyes Have you name changed?

There are a few threads about additional work at home by first time posters. see here.

I'm with Agapanthii here. See how she gets on - teacher thinks she's ready. Some are ready at that age, some not. See how it goes

And i'd rather trust a qualified teacher too

My DD has also finished all the words that they send home for Reception children. She hasn't been given spellings as such but the teacher suggested that the next step is to write the same words reliably so we have just been making up sentences using them and writing those (then she does a picture of what she's written which she really enjoys, esp if we have made a funny sentence). Do you think they mean doing something like this rather than just learning spellings? It's being able to write them that's important rather than knowing the spelling IYSWIM.

Really, what's to understand about a teacher giving a pupil a few spellings?! Er, I think I understand what she's doing without having to make an appointment. My educated guess would be that she's trying to teach her to read and write.

The problem, Agapanthii, as Bonsoir suggests, is that not all teachers are properly trained to teach reading and spelling and even in the case of those that are, they don't always use what they've been taught!
But, I return to the point I made before: why would you send spellings home that are not commensurate with what the child is learning in their phonics lessons? Or is this so blindingly obvious to everyone that you're thinking grandmothers, sucking and eggs?

But the OP didn't say the spellings being sent home were not commensurate with her phonics learning. My experience of early spellings are that they do relate to the phonics - hat, cat, bat one week, men, hen, ten another etc. Lots of assumptions being made here - that the dd's teacher is not properly trained to teach a 4yr old to spell, not using their knowledge , not providing phonics - based spellings... none of which were issues brought up by the OP.

"Lots of assumptions being made here - that the dd's teacher is not properly trained to teach a 4yr old to spell, not using their knowledge , not providing phonics - based spellings... none of which were issues brought up by the OP"
Yes, lots of assumptions based on the evidence I see every day in my training of teachers. Hardly a single person who attends our trainings has ever received any training at all in phonics. Hardly any of these has had 'training' in how to use Letters and Sounds', other than a quick overview. And, as for spellings sent home, they are often a ragbag of words that often include HFWs containing more complex spellings.