Year 5 spellings

[MrsLadyWoman1]

I queried some of the spelling my son is being given for homework, and was told that they are from the list of words on the Year 5 Curriculum. The most recent include antiburglar, nonaligned, nonfictional, nonexchangeable and irrecoverable. I had a look online, and there's no mention of these words in the downloadable .gov.uk PDF, but I might not be looking at the very latest one. It's not the difficulty level that concerns me, but the lack of hyphenation, very niche use and - well, is nonfictional even a word? Isn't it just 'factual'? If anyone has the latest list, I'd love to see it!

It's the prefixes which are on the list - 'non','anti','ir'

It's very hard to think of sensible words with those prefixes.

Thanks for clarifying - I thought it was the actual words that were on the curriculum, rather than any words with those prefixes. I guess I'll just take it up with the school then. Anti-clockwise, antisocial, nonsense, nonentity, nonexistent and irresistable spring to mind, but as I say, it was more the idea that some of these words should be hyphenated or maybe don't exist that bothered me.

Hyphenation is gradually disappearing. This often makes reading more difficult rather than easier, e.g cooperation.

That's probably true, but the government document covering spellings for Year 5 actually has a unit for hyphens, saying they "can be used to join a prefix to a root word, especially if the prefix ends in a vowel letter and the root word also begins with one" and giving the examples co-ordinate, re-enter, co-operate and co-own, so schools should still be teaching them.

so schools should still be teaching them.

I am delighted to hear that. Just for once I completely agree with marsha; losing the hyphens from words like co-operate just makes reading much harder.