Do all reception classes "grade" children into ability groups?

[jollydo]

After reading about this on different threads here I just wondered if this is normal practise. How do the groups usually work - is it the tables children sit at for "sit down" work? How long do they spend in these groups & do they know they are being ability grouped? (My ds is due to start in September and I don't know if our local school does this. I worry about children having these labels so early, & that they could make a child think of him/herself in a particular way that might stick & become self-fulfilling.)

Not quite Reception, but DD's Nursery class is streamed when they do 'Big Writing'. I don't think the children have any idea why they sit on specific tables to do it, and I don't think it would matter to them if they did. They'll be streamed for more things in Reception iirc (it's been a couple of years but I think they had animal tables, DS2 was a Parrot whatever that meant )

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JingleyJen, your DS's teacher would have been making observations and assessments about him since the day he walked into nursery for his Foundation Stage Profile. It will be continued when he goes into Reception. You have the right to see these - just ask.

Some schools do and some schools don't and others have ability groups for certain activities and mixed groups for others. Children very soon work out which group is which in ability grouped classes.

I used to work with a dreadful teacher who named her groups after animals. This started at the top with eagles moving down to others such as squirrels and rabbits. No prizes for guessing what sort of child sat on the moles table.

I don't think that it should necessarily be a big secret though, I can remember being in reception and asking my teacher (at the end of the day, not in fornt of the other children) if the Rockets were the cleverer group (it went rockets, planes, cars, submarines...) it was fairly obvious, rockets read books with paragraphs, submarines were learning the alphabet, rockets always got 20/20 in spellings, submarines only had 10 spellings and got most of those wrong.
I was shouted at for asking and made to feel as if it was a big taboo that people are good at different things, it took me a while to get over it, i couldn't understand why I was wrong for asking.

There is a huge difference in age between the oldest child in reception and the youngest. You have one child who can write at 5 and another child who can't hold a pencil at four years old. The four year old child might be more intelligent, but in a lower group.

These groups are not set in stone and the four year old who is in the bottom set in reception might be in the top groups at secondary school.

Sometimes they'll be grouped by ability, sometimes for other reasons (eg to keep 2 of them apart, if they wind each other up!). What you need to feel confident of is that the teacher is making sure all of the children are achieving what they are capable of, and has a reasonably clear view of your child's strengths and weaknesses. Beyond that, how the teacher arranges the practicalities shouldn't be an issue.