Have a first from Oxford. Can't do ks2 sats

[TheNext]

In particular the spag. I have never heard of a subordinating conjunction before. It has literally not been a thing that has touched my life. When I googled it, I recognised the thing in the description but I have never had to know the name. I have straight As all the way through secondary education and a good career and this is something I have never needed.

And they are making 10yos memorise this? And adverbials (also had to google). Ye Gods! Why?

I don't think anyone said they were actually doing their kids' homework for them. It sounds more like people are wading in trying to help when the kids are flummoxed and don't know what to do.

Surely better if teachers know child doesn’t understand than get correct answers due to parents help.

jumping is also a gerund as well as a noun.

It sounds more like people are wading in trying to help when the kids are flummoxed and don't know what to do.
Easy: look it up. Then tell them the answer.

I don't see why people should be indignant or surprised that children are taught different things to what we were taught. I feel like part of it is that phonics makes reading and writing so much easier there is more space for this stuff. DD's class were learning about adjectives at 4-5. They're also routinely covering spellings I remember my class being taught in year 6 (alternative ai/ay/a_e spellings). And already using cursive handwriting that we had to re-learn laboriously in year 3 after spending the first 3 years learning print. And still spending far more of their day playing than we ever got to.

I so wish I had been taught proper grammar in English, it would have made Latin and modern languages so much easier to learn.

My colleagues in Italy were astonished that I had no really grasp of grammar when they tried to explain certain sentence constructions to me.

Fully in favour of the change - was about time.

Surely better if teachers know child doesn’t understand than get correct answers due to parents help.
I think sometimes a bit of 1:1 not limited by 29 other children and a timetable might have a benefit. And just to be clear, when I say tell them the answer, I mean the answer to what a fronted adverbial etc is, not the answer to their homework. Make sure they understand the concept, then they can get the right answers for themselves. (Not that DC have had any difficulties with grammar, it's all been very simple so far.)

I agree 1-1 with parent can help but teacher also needs to be aware that child needed this in order to complete the homework or they will make incorrect assumptions

I just asked ds what is "fronted adverbials" are, and his answer was simple.
He said it's a sentence opener that is an adverb, like " Noisily, the cat meowed at the frog."
I don't think it's ott at all for primary children.

Bright and privileged people can often pick up how to use punctuation and avoid ungrammatical sentences through osmosis, via reading. For all of those saying they achieved an X level degree without being explicitly taught grammar: these changes aren't aimed at benefiting people like you.

They are aimed at those who don't understand what a sentence is, and thus constantly produce run-on sentences or sentence fragments, and who don't understand how to use punctuation, including commas. Some people need more formal instruction in how sentences and punctuation work in order to write well - if you didn't, then you should count yourself lucky, but please make allowances for those who do.

I think it's taught in yr 4 irvine. Unless that's just DS's school.
I did find DS's targets rather comical though: remember full stops and capital letters, and use fronted adverbials in his writing! Suspect he will find the latter easier than the former. Thoroughly embedded bad habit.

mrz, I don't think homework is used for assessment like that at our school - if they don't understand it I'm sure they'd already know from classwork. They hold information evenings for parents and we're positively encouraged to help the children if they need help. Maybe that's just our school then.

Not just your school catkind but I’ve heard many parents complain that the teacher appeared to be unaware that their child struggled with x, y and z while admitting they did their child’s homework for them.

I set individual homework that reflects what the child needs to practise (and annotate it to inform parents) but that’s just me and may not be other schools.

We do have information evenings for parents at our school as well cat, but attendance is always low, and mostly consists of parents of able children.
I wonder those who think things taught in primary are ott doesn't actually know how well the teacher teaches children, and children are capable and willing to learn.
Ds's writing definitely improved after learning all those silly things called grammar.

I set individual homework that reflects what the child needs to practise (and annotate it to inform parents) but that’s just me and may not be other schools.

Bloody hell mrz, do you ever sleep? Your class are so so lucky. Nothing remotely like that here. Homework is very undifferentiated.

It’s why I need to get off MN and stay off!

NO !!!!!!!!

Annoyingly, they aren't even being taught grammar correctly if you were to ask a linguist! Teachers, especially in primary school, find the literacy curriculum soul-destroying because children are no longer rewarded for writing a good story, all that matters is the grammar.

SPAG is intended to crush all the creativity of children at state schools.

No kids do them at private schools. This way, the kids of Tory ministers will face less competition for jobs that require creative thinking from kids from state schools.

It does bizarrely seem that if you want a rounded education in a family like setting, that isn't target driven by progress every 15minutes, with freedom to explore interesting ideas and run with kids interests.... You want a private school not most state ones.

DDs English work differs wildly between Years 5 and 6 (she's Year 8 now). In Year 5 her spelling and grammar were both pretty good, not perfect, but perfectly acceptable for a 9/10 year old. In Year 6 they had both improved, but the quality of the work; the flow and the imagination is awful. Everything is disjointed. It all obviously follows a formula and it makes even her most challenging work, the pieces she tried her hardest on, terrible (and forgive me, boring.)

Thankfully after a full year at High School she is getting her mojo back.

Kesstrel, totally agree that most people require deliberate instruction in grammar and spelling (I was one of those people who picked it up regardlessnot everyone does!). I do, however, feel that the balance is a bit skewed right now. Some of the grammar stuff my nephews have been expected to learn is really, really esotericand then in the meantime, their spelling is weak and could really use some work. I think there needs to more emphasis on the S and P and less on the G, given how limited classroom instructional time is.

Hopefully the situation will resolve itself as the new policies are gradually embedded.

Re: parents' role in this kind of homework:

When my child does homework set by her private tutor, I have her do it without any help so that the tutor can see what her weak points are and adjust lessons accordingly.

The thing is, though, that's what you pay for when you pay those (eye-watering) private tutor remuneration fees.

With 30 kids or whatever in a class, I don't think it's realistic to expect that the teacher is going to be able to offer different tasks to each child based on in-depth analysis of what they achieved in homework task. Sounds like Mrz does this (and if she does, I am seriously impressed because that sounds like a lot of work) but I can't see most teachers managing to do so.

Realistically, if my child can't do a homework task set by a classroom teacher, that's my cue to wade in and re-teach it to them myself. I would never let them hand in a half-completed worksheet and rely on the teacher to reteach it to them during the next lesson.

actually, make that

"I would never let them hand in a half-completed worksheet and rely on the teacher to reteach it to them during the next lesson OR set differentiated homework tasks. My brain is bleeding thinking about how much work that would require on behalf of the teacher."

If there are teachers who really and truly are setting differentiated work and differentiated homework based on looking at each student's level of performance.... my response is two-fold. Firstly, Christ almighty, that is bloody amazing and shows an incredible level of dedication and work ethic. But also, it suggests a major reason for the workload crisis and problems in teacher retention. :(

DH has a Masters in a numerate subject and, at work, handles datasets with millions of records.

He just failed at the first hurdle on Y1 Maths homework. Turns out he couldn't work out that T and U stands for Tens and Units.

But it looks like the boundary between being taught like that, and not being taught like that, falls somewhere in the late 60s/early 70s - as he went to primary school in the early 60s and had no clue, whereas I went in the mid-70s and knew this (unless it was like sets, and they introduced it to secondary schools in the 80s and primary schools later).

Kokeshi Yes, it's entirely possible that this specific SPAG curriculum is not well designed. I was really arguing against those who claimed on this thread that since they never needed grammar teaching, so no one else should.

However, a badly designed SPAG curriculum is not surprising when education academics, who ought properly to be the people investigating what good grammar teaching in English would consist of, have long abandoned that responsibility.

It was education academics who were responsible for advocating abandoning formal teaching of grammar back in the 70s. Teachers didn't just make up the idea that they should instead be telling children merely that 'a sentence is a complete thought", or to 'put a comma in where you would stop to take a breath'. The result is that we now have little idea of how and when to teach grammar effectively, so it's perhaps not surprising that the government's SPAG curriculum is not well designed.

It was education academics who were responsible for advocating abandoning formal teaching of grammar back in the 70s

There was a rather different group of academics in post then, somehow I think they have mainly retired by now! Or do you think they are everlasting?

There's lots of good research on how to teach children spelling, punctuation, and explicit knowledge of grammar.