Have a go at the key stage 2 grammar SATS.

[neolara]

Have a go at this mini Key Stage 2 SATs test.

See if you'd pass.

I think it's incredibly important that all 10 year olds know what subordinating conjunctions, modal verbs and determiners are because I use these terms on a daily basis in my actual daily grown up life.

In fact, I'm delighted that my kids will be spending more time learning to label parts of speech and consequently less time on largely irrelevant stuff like computer programming, art, developing social skills, music, history, geography etc. The sort of things that barely impacts on my actual daily grown up life as I work alongside other people, use computers every day, travel, work as a social scientist, appreciate a wide range of cultural experiences such as music on the radio, plays, art galleries .......

While I totally get the need for kids to learn good spelling, punctuation and grammar, somehow I can't get my head round the feeling that things have just gone nuts. Firstly, learning to label grammar parts is not the same as learning to use good grammar. Secondly, learning to label grammar parts at the expense of learning all the other much more useful stuff seems crazy.

Many sites have responded to the contents of the curriculum so aren't the most reliable sources.
I remember attending a grammar conference a number of years ago and "fronted adverbial" was one of the terms discussed by the presenter (a well respected and very experienced educator) as a "made up" term.
I learnt "articles" "quantifies" and "possessives" in school but now they are grouped as "determiners"
Grammar terms like most things is subject to time and "fashion"

Some of the terminology might be open to discussion, but that doesn't mean it's all useless.

Yes, I thought that was the case. Thank you for info, I really appreciate it.
I think I can be quite relaxed because my ds is still in YR3, I think I would be panicking if he was in YR6.

No one said it was useless ... It's the statutory content of the national curriculum so has to be taught!
I can't seem to find any similar content in your earlier link?

Do you mean my link?

Or mine?

50%
How embarrassing.

Agree with OP, what about all the pe, computer skills etc.
Is this really necessary? For a yr6? Awful.

Dorothy's link

Thinking this over, things may have become a bit confused because the original link was about the year 6 requirements, but it then moved to year 2 expectations. German children don't start reading until they are 6 so the initial grammar expectations are not equivalent, and I concede that year 2 seems very young for a formal grammar test, though I'm still not entirely sure what exactly is being tested at that age - is there a sample paper available?

Certainly by year 6 age German children deal with all the terminology, here's another link to illustrate:
http://www.giesensdorfer-grundschule.de/Unterricht/Deutsch/Klasse4-66_Grammatik

My ds, who has asd traits, find it fun to categorise everything. So learning complex grammar rules can be fun for him. But, I doubt it would be same for most of children, and there are a lot more important things for 5/6 or 10/11 years olds to learn at school.

I spent a year in primary school in France when I was 7/8- learnt enough grammar during that one year to take me through the rest of primary in uk, where grammar was a dirty word. I am very lucky to have done French and German a level, but only "enjoyed" the grammar because I'd been taught it in an age appropriate way when I was 7: blissful days spent underlining the parts of speech in lilac, pink and green chalk on our little blackboards. We were never told that it was something difficult or scary, and we had to cope with genders, irregular verb groups and more.

I got 90%. Understanding how language works is not hard, it is just unfamiliar and takes a while to get used to. And it lays the foundation for so much more- you can't do philosophical logic or AI if you don't understand language.

Thank you for that post, doesthatmakesense, so true!!

Grammar teaching has been a statutory element of the National Curriculum for 20+ years it's the tests that are new.

But not grammar teaching with this terminology!

Gdammar teaching with terminology

My dd's never did any of this...

Mrz I am older than the national curriculum- and lots of teachers are the same age as me or older, and we got almost nothing.

I got 70% - but some were guessed.
My Yr6 DD also got 70%

I am very happy with my score, I did better than I thought I would. DD is really upset "I did really bad. I only got 7 right. That's really bad. I need to do more spag today"

Her teacher has set the whole class up on a Spag website - she can set tests and record scores. DD has done 4 of them over the weekend, scoring an average of 42/50. I've been impressed with her knowledge, but apparently it's not good enough . It's bloody half term and my kid is doing tests instead of playing - I will be VERY glad when this year is over.

But then the DfE changed the hail posts and moved KS2 content to KS1 and KS3 content to KS2 ...

I suspect I'm older than you does and I was taught grammar

2000DfEE publication www.hamilton-trust.org.uk/system/files/page_files/grammar_for_writing.pdf notice no fronted adverbials etc

This is moving all over the place. It started with year 6 requirements, and it was pointed out that other countries cope with this fine. Then it was said "but what about year 2?", and now it has suddenly been taught all along...

One minute it's degree-level linguistics, the next an old hat...

It seems to me that most people (parents and teachers) do not disagree that teaching the grammar content (including the proper terminology) is important and has its uses later.

The sticky point seems to be the tests. Too early and not in line with age maturity for most Year 2 children, not fair for the current Year 6 children that were not taught under the current new curriculum for most of their primary years.

What I don't understand is why in the past (when levels existed) it was possible to enter the children on different tests according to their ability, and now that is not possible? I never got to experience that system as my son in in Year 2 now (no levels), but a test system like that would have been better then. Some children might be okay with the new SATs in Year 2 for a variety of reasons (they are already reading chapter books and complex texts ahead of their age, so would be more familiar with examples of sentences using complex grammar, might have a great visual memory, enjoy categorizing things so think grammar is fun, might be bilingual or multilingual so are not strange to the use of grammar in more languages), but at the same time, many other children will not have the maturity to take a test like this when they don't even know how to read the question let alone understand it.

I can see what the teachers are trying to say. I just don't understand why all children have to take the same test when obviously they are not all at the same level of attainment.

Sorry Dorothy I should t have assumed you could make connections.

In England schools taught the content of the statutory National Curriculum to all children in state maintained schools ...this included the specified grammar content taught within the context of reading and writing. Last year a new National Curriculum was introduced and this year children will be tested on the content of that new curriculum (which is different to the one they have followed for six years and includes different grammar terminology for the same language features) ...the content has also been moved down so 6/7 year olds are now expected to meet the expectations whinch were previously for 9 year oldis and 10/11 year olds the expectations previously for 14 year olds ...
So yes things like verb (tenses) nouns (proper, pro, concrete and abstract) adjectives and adverbs etc are old hat being tested on them out of context isn't!