Do primary school teachers still meke children do this at teh start of a new term

[queenofthemountain]

write about
'what I did in the holidays

Usually children write about their experiences and then either talk about them or they go up on the wall.

It might not matter to you that they just played on the x-box, but if you're the child who played on the x-box and didn't get taken anywhere for whatever reason I can imagine it's not quite so irrelevant.

Chances are the children have already spoken to each other about it in the playground or whatever.

I do have a disclaimer in that my two were in classes of 15 in First School so everybody tended to know what everyone had done if that doesn't sound too terrible. This is my own personal experience of all this and it obviously doesn't match up with a lot of others.

Very interested to know mrz what you do instead for an initial writing task - always looking for new ideas.

I don't think I ever did it in KS2, however in ks1 the children often ask to do it. We do lots of discussion first and talk about how it should be one day. I will often choose something like a visit to the park to model before the children start independent work. I've around it useful at the start of term as it's something that needs comparatively little input, gives me a baseline for their writing and tells me a little about each child.

No, not here - most of the mums work so the kids aren't out playing with each other to share the news, and we have bigger classes. They don't tend to speak about their holidays in the earlier years of school ime - it's only when they are forced to write about them by the school.

How about...

1. Create a new holiday - when would it be, why would you have it?
2. Where did summer go?
3. I'm looking forward to...
4. I really enjoyed reading this book/playing this game over the holidays
5. If it were summer every day I would..
6. Someone interesting/someone I admired who I met over the holidays was...
7. What was my best memory from last year at school?

Are any of the above any good?

Toomuchicecream I would spend the time teaching rather than asking them to write about their holiday as a time filler.

Interestingly I've never had a single child ask to write about their holidays or what they got for Christmas in my time teaching FS / KS1

DS has to do this.

He did last year too but it took until the last term of Y4 before his teacher got round to looking at his work

Time fillers!!-who has time for those?!

I am fortunate enough to work in a school where time spent on building self confidence and self esteem is valued. I/the children reap the rewards of a very gentle, non threatening (as described above!) start to the term in terms of the excellent progress the children make over the year. We push and move the children on to more challenging work when they feel safe and secure in their classroom environment with a new teacher.

This simple, first recount make sound like a time filler (!) to some but I suppose, like anything! it all depends on how the teachers approaches the task.

SirChenjin. A lovely list-and I have used some of those ideas before. nice to be reminded. They are all more challenging for the children than a simple recount though only because the require more thought than simply remembering something they have done recently and enjoyed. I often move on after the recount to 'what will holidays be like in the future?' But that is more talk based.

I've done this with Year 1. It's good practise for when they write recounts further up the school. I model in shared writing, purposely choosing a child's 'local' activity to model sentence structure, past tense etc. I've yet to hear a child say, "But they went to the Bahamas and I only went to Blackpool!". More often than not it's me thinking, "I could only afford a week in Prestatyn!" Yes it has it's pros and cons, certainly wouldn't do it higher up the school.

Time fillers = write about your holidays even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with this years curriculum\topics\planning but it fills a writing lesson

Ah well, we will have to agree to differ. It may have no value in your class but it certainly does in mine. Luckily as teachers we do still have some autonomy in how to approach planning in order to meet writing objectives and we can link that across the curriculum as we see fit.

What value in particular could not be met by some other topic?

I hated this, my holidays were spent in the house all 6 weeks, mum couldn't drive or afford the buses to the local town, let alone entrance fees when we got there. Dad hated spending any time with mum so never took holiday.
So my holidays were playing with mates around our area.
I was not in a poor area, everyone else went on holiday.

So yes i could write about my days being a spy, or a kid with a ghost in the loft, who died in the workhouse where our house now is, but i knew every one else was writing about their weeks holiday with happy families, and the whole exercise made me feel very jealous in a way playground discussions being fleeting never did.

But obv. Did as i still feel it now.

I hated this as a child. We never went anywhere or did anything.
I remember wanting to go camping - we never did. I wanted to pick berries at a pick-your-own farm - we never did (still haven't).
Looking back, I wish I actually wrote what a frustrating, boring time I had during the holidays - maybe would have been therapeutic. Instead I made something up.

You have just read many first hand accounts of children ending up feeling like crap doing this exercise, and the crapness has stayed with them to adulthood.

'Agree to differ' an odd way to look at something that causes hurt to so many.

Agree Nutella.

Given both the first hand accounts of how this affects people well into adulthood and the fact that there are numerous other topics that could be used by schools - why on earth does any teacher persist in doing this?

It surprises me how many of you remember writing about your holidays in KS1 and being made to feel crap about it, I do wonder if its down to the way it was done.

I was very much the poor kid in a very middle class school, my friends had horses and foreign holidays, I went camping in my back garden as my holiday and if I was really lucky mum would stretch to a bag of marshmallows so we could have a campfire, often at the expense of having to walk to work coz she couldn't afford the bus, I didn't feel crap about it until later, I didn't really realise we were poor when I was small.

My Rainbows do news the first meeting of each term, one girl practically exploded after Easter wanting to tell me about her holiday, it wasn't the trip to Florida she went on about though, it was that her cat had released a mouse in the kitchen and Mummy had screamed and hid on the table The point is a 5/6/7 year old doesn't know that a trip to Spain is more worthy of writing about than a nights camping under a sheet on the washing line, so long as the teacher acts suitably impressed and finds points to value its fine.

You are assuming that some children get to experience a night under the stars camping. Imagine if your holiday news was that the police took daddy away or mummy's boyfriend smashed up the house!

My girls are currently writing theirs as we speak. They've had to do them a few times, and the girls really like them and particularly like reading them again years later.

This year, we went to Scotland to watch the commonwealth games, so they're only writing about the games, but they've gone off and done loads of research about the games, and the countries involved to include in their diaries.

I think it's a nice way of keeping the students ticking over the holidays, where they can write as much or as little as they like. We haven't had the expensive holidays that some of DDs friends have - but even a day trip in England can provide lots to write about - and DD like collecting information about the places they go, finding out about the history etc. it can be so much more than just a recall task.

But I'm a meant and set my students homework too. Helps to combat the regression over the long summer holidays. My students are older, so don't do diaries though .

mrz yes I am assuming that children have done something (not necessarily camping, just used that as an example). You aren't telling me that there are children who have spent the entire 6 weeks sat in a completely empty room doing absolutely nothing? So they've not been to the park or played computer games or even played in their rooms?

Even staying at home with parents that are busy there is plenty a child could do that would be worth writing about, for example DD's written a page in her scrapbook about it being too stormy to go out and me being too busy to play so she built a fort behind the sofa out of blankets, another page is about building a fairy grotto, we made paper lanterns and hung them up, stuck some paper wings on her teddies and a blanket on the floor to sit on. Childminders or holiday clubs will have activities going on so those children will have something they can write about too.

Even if part of what happened over the holidays was that Daddy had been taken away or the boyfriend had smashed the house up, (or mum had been rushed to intensive care, which happened a few times when I was little) there will still likely have been other things that happened in the holidays too and I'm sure if there was a child whose holiday was truly that awful that there wasn't likely to have been a single nice thing happen in the holidays the teacher would know/have been warned and have planned something else for them to write about.

So not going to rethink your annual pattern of getting pupils to write about the holidays then, despite the negative personal experiences on here....?

SirChenjin, I'm a TA not a teacher, so I don't set the work. I'm just saying I wonder how much of the negative experiences on here were the way it was done as they're very different to my experiences and there is no reason why, when done properly, it should be an issue.

My apologies Bramwell - I got you confused with one of the teachers upthread

I don't think it is just a case of 'doing it properly' - children are incredibly good at seeing things for what they are, and although a really good teacher will do things better than less good teachers I don't think it's always sufficient to ameliorate the negative emotions and feelings that this task brings - esp. when there are so many other (better) options available. It would be interesting to hear from those posters who have been affected though.

The issue for me is that the subject is often unrelated to the work carried out in the class and is just thrown in as something easy to get them to write before we start teaching.

It might have some value if you were doing a topic on holidays but as I said there are other ideas which wouldn't leave children feeling left out because they have no holiday experience to share.

I've heard children as young as 3 telling the class that their holiday to Disney World Florida is much better than EuroDisney as it cost more and is bigger and better (obviously something they've heard at home) so it's naive to imagine young children aren't aware.