Year 1 parents evening

[MrPickles73]

I have DS' yr 1 parents evening tonight. He is very happy and our only concern is whether it's sufficiently challenging for him. He is a good reader and v good at maths for his age but often says the work at school is easy. Whether this is true or not...

Any tips would be welcome as we only get 8 min and I often come away feeling like I haven't learnt anything..

Ask the teacher to show you his progress in his workbooks. At Year 1 this should be easy to demonstrate. They should also be able to tell you whether your DS is working at "expected" or "depth" level in English, maths, writing and topic work.

You can and should voice your concerns that he is saying the work is easy; a good teacher will be able to tell you how they are challenging him, and of course a look in his books will tell you how much of the maths he is getting right!

I had similar concerns for my DD in Y1. However, there is an element of ‘too late’ about this.

Have you talked to the teacher during the year about your DS finding the work easy? What was the response?

They can hardly do anything a couple of weeks before the end of the year.

At parents’ evening I always ask what my DD struggles with. If they say ‘nothing’, I raise this as a concern, and ask how they propose to challenge her – and follow up on it.

You might want to try asking this sort of question early on in Y2, perhaps by the October half term.

If your DS is confident, you could encourage him to ask for more/harder work. My DD did this quite effectively in Y1.

I concur that it seems a little pointless to do parents evening at the end of the year. It would make more sense to do them in the autumn and spring terms.

That's a good tip re asking about what they struggle with. Thank you

A word of warning - be careful how you word it. It can be quite disconcerting for a teacher if a parent says there child isn’t being challenged (and a parent saying their child is bored is the one that really offends!). As someone else says, it would be useful to know if he has been assessed as being at ‘Greater Depth’ and then you could ask what sort of work he is doing at this higher level. If he is at expected you could ask whether he has the potential to be GD if he’s challenged further.