Ks2 sats week 2015

[Catbat77]

I have a very nervous dd this morning, wanted to hear other parents thoughts or experiences this week!

Northumberland is God's allotment, mrz!
Naughtiness aside, it's wonderful your primary school provides free ukulele lessons and instruments to all children that wish to partake.
Sadly, that is not the case in the area I live in- former mining comunitity in Durham?
I coul be even naughtier to raise the notion of strings- but, hey, what's the point?

Gosh, this invisibility cloak is useful.

Ukulexpelliarmus ??

Feenie,

I see and understand. So,now the question is what should the whole class ukele lesson replace?

Maybe a shifting pattern so one subject does not get hit?

We had playground ukulele group last year. A massive group of y6 lads with their own ukes and a pro guitarist member of staff. It was absolutely awesome . In a school with double the average sen and fsm.

Interesting Proggy I teach in a former mining village in Durham

HowDoes it replaces a music lesson ... All children are meant to have music lessons.

Music lessons on rotating timetable as DS' s school and guitar teacher has been doing some juggling to accommodate SATS and next week's residential.

I had forgotten that most of your DC's are taught in mixed ability groups still. Much easier for middle school teachers in Year 6 as maths and English are both setteed so whole class at same level.

It would be a very unusual middleschool that had classes where every child in the class had identical ability and needs IMHE

I probably haven't explained that properly , a bit early. There is a fair bit of movement in year 6, DS has a form and they are together for tutor time, humanities, french, science, plus all go off together to art and music. They're split for PE and DT and mixed up with other classes but think that is a fairly arbitrary split.

For Maths and English ie. SATs papers they all split up into ability groups based on CATs tests they do when they arrive in year 5 plus performance over the year, so class vanishes off to various rooms and there is top set maths, top set English etc and then the lower sets have smaller group sizes. So the English and Maths teachers can tailor lessons for pupils of fairly similar ability eg. Top Maths set had choice of l6 paper, all the class solid l5 by this point and it would have been much easier for teacher to cover the L6 stuff in lessons than for a teacher in primary school who will have children whose ability at that time covers a much wider range - highly convenient for SATs year and much easier on the teachers than for a primary teacher taking one mixed ability class all the time (if that is how primary schools still work, was many years since I was in one).

The top sets won't be identical ability but what I'm getting at in a very long winded way is there will be less of a variation in ability in each maths and English class than in a primary school.

No your explanation was clear I just disagree

Hitler SAT's video. Doing the rounds on Facebook atm. Very funny and very clever. And I think very true.

I laughed out loud at the end!

In primary, over the yrs, DD also regularly missed art-ICT-topic lessons so she could go to violin. She only minded missing PE, we managed to shift her lesson to last 10 minutes of lunch playtime instead.

music teachers do rotate their tmetables, hopwever, so a child misses different lessons each week.

That's what they do for DD's secondary violin lessons.

Would not have guessed that you were such a huge fan of strict interpretation of statutory requirements, Feenie.

Sugarplumtree I wish they had set the class like that in my children's school.
Am I the only one to find that SATs video incredibly depressing.My youngest dc4 was consistently downgraded in infants in literacy and he was very reluctantly given a 3 in the ks1 tests.Now all of a sudden he is considered above average .He 's been the same bright child all along.Its enough to make you lose your faith in state education.

Part of the reason that levels have been scrapped is that they were only ever intended as a measure at the end of each key stage but schools have been under pressure to provide parents with levels at each step and their use to set targets for teachers resulting in a total mess.

Setting has been shown to be at the best ineffective in primary and at the worst detrimental.

I think believing that an IQ test (CATs) or indeed any other test does more than provide a snapshot at a single point is niaive.

Even within sets /ability groups there is a spread of "knowledge and skills" unless every single child correctly answered the exact same questions .... It's flawed!

"We have music in classrooms or the hall if necessary"

I should clarify:

Weekly whole class music lessons happen in classrooms.

On top of this, individual music lessons happen in the box room music room and when that is already in use in slightly smaller box room only iother spare space.

Hall has 100% timetabled occupancy, and the only time a classroom is empty is during PE lessons, which would entail the instrumental teachers (all of whom do at least a half day at a time in school) dodging in and out iof classrooms during changing times, off to the next class which has PE etc.

It is a bit like the 'where do children change for PE' question that arises here regularly - in a school that was designed for less than 2/3 of the childen it has at present, free spaces for ANYTHING are at a premium.

Ok cool.Don't even know if I agree witb sets that age, we have no choice. I thought it would be easier for the teacher having l3-4 or 4-5, or 5-6 rather than 4-6 but appreciate that is a simplistic view that just occurred to me as I forget it is different for most of you.

As I said, we have no choice, just as no choice to go to anything other than a church school. There is the illusion of choice as in you can put a primary in LEA or a non church school but you don't get a space.

We had a big reorganisation of when music teachers came into school to try to prevent the "dodging in and out" of lessons scenario which greatly annoys teachers and parents.

Sugar, I have taught in both setted and non-setted schools.

Non-setted is better for the children, but harder work for teachers IMO (maybe because my class had from P6 - below Level 1 - to level 4 in it).

Setted still requires significant differentiation, but it IS easier to plan for because the range is restricted. It can also encourage poorer teaching because less good teachers WON'T differentiate as much as they need to 'because the children are set' [this is rare, but it does happen]. It is less good for children IME because of the 'labelling' and effects on self-belief and because it does not allow for children who have different needs in different areas of the subject. That said, there are a few children at 'extremes' where a setted structure can be of benefit in collecting together those of 'like ability' when the number of such children is rare.

However, also IME, parents strongly prefer setting, which makes it hard for a traditionally 'setted' school to move to mxed ability teaching, however strong the belief in the staff that it would be better for the majority of children.

How much control do you have over when the music teachers come in then mrz? If you have a lot it's probably easier to manage. I'm not sure many of our schools could find the space to have all 5 teachers in at once.

I think we're very lucky to have a schools music lesson service at all, I imagine the pay is rubbish & we're not going to get 3 teachers turning up simultaneously to teach just three pupils each just so it can all be time-tabled with maximum thought to disruption to subjects that aren't subject to external performance monitoring. Wouldn't be cost effective to the instructors, for a start.

I suppose DS could have been pulled out of regular math sessions to do L6 booster sessions (would that tick people's boxes of approval?), but I suspect the relevant staff were already working then with other kids (like the sub-L4 ones) at the time. We don't have infinite spare staff.

Mrz,

With at least one (usually 2) instrumental teacher teaching at every single time point between 8.25 amd and 3.10 pm, every day of the week, we don't have a lot of flexibility! I can see that if it is a smaller school, with a smaller % of children having such lessons it is easier to juggle.

(Correction for clarity - not all of the teachers work through lunch with individuals, as they run large ensembles at lunch time, using the hall)

I suppose DS could have been pulled out of regular math sessions to do L6 booster sessions (would that tick people's boxes of approval?)

No! If the next level of progression is level 6 then that should be what they are taught as part and parcel of their maths lessons. They shouldn't have to be withdrawn at all simply to progress, and presumably won't be from now on, since it's all new curriculum 2014.