Do reception age children get put into ability groups?

[CrapBag]

Just wondering. I saw a thing on the board in the classroom recently about assessment of a couple of things like numbers and literacy etc and now the children are in groups.

Do they get put in groups based on ability at this stage?

Grouped in our school from Nursery - but only for such small parts of the whole day. In Nursery - just a 10-15 minute session in 3 hours. In Reception, 1 session of numeracy, one of phonics per day.
All other activities - reading, key words and adult initiated activities are done to individual ability.
In general it helps to have similar ability groups so that the lesson can be pitched to keep everyone engaged. Too easy and you're not stretching them, too difficult and looking out the window/at shoe etc will seem more attractive.
I suppose it also depends on the size of class. Ours still has 15 children to each ability group, and there can be a lot of differences even within 15.

We don't ability group in any year group.

mrz, can I ask how many levels of differentiation you do for a Y5 numeracy group? Asking for this as I had an interesting discussion with the teacher in this year about exactly the same

IIRC, work was differentiated and this is a good thing. I really don't know how obvious it was to the children though, because in practice it must have looked like grouping. For example, after assessment, some children were doing maths to 10 and some to 20; all children had reading books to match their individual level, though the whole class worked through a phonics programme together; and there were usually three or so different writing targets on the go.

The school set for maths quite early on, and for English in year 4; everything else stays in whole class groups.

I don't teach Y5 so don't have a definitive answer but the simple answer is as many as needed for that particular lesson. For some aspects - shape for example it will mainly be whole class, for calculation it may 4 or 5 levels.

That seems manageable. DS1s teacher is doing 8/9 levels and I think is feeling quite stressed as the difference in trying to teach, encompassing all those and stretching the more able in a class of 35 is quite a stretch. 4/5 is what they had last year, but they could move groups out of year - so covering the top/bottom levels. This year has been changed and the organisational side of it does not now allow for this.

Often differentiation has to take place as and when needed rather than minutely planned in advance for the benefit of head teachers rather than the child.
a very sensible message from Michael Wilshaw
t.co/uNN10iA2

When ds2 does guided reading (group of children reading with a teacher) he is in a group of children who are broadly on the same level. More attainment than ability at this age, though.

Ours were grouped for phonics. I think largely it was more the older ones in one group and the younger ones in another to start with. By year 1 it seemed to become a bit more to do with how far they'd got with the reading.