Active discussions

Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Primary education

Join our Primary Education forum to discuss starting school and helping your child get the most out of it.

Original poster

KS2 SATS writing topic - favouring the boys ?

82 replies

orangetulip · 13/05/2009 13:19

DS came home yesterday saying the long writing topic had been to write a review of a PC game ...
(What about kids who don't have a computer I'm quietly thinking....)
Is this a ploy by the government to claim they have addressed the imbalance between boys / girls' writing - or has my cynicism of SATS just gone too far this time ?! What do you think ?

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
Set a reminder
ellingwoman · 13/05/2009 17:54

Dd1 cocked up as well. They had to write it in the first person and she wrote it in the third person. Or vice-versa. Didn't read the question properly. She's really upset as she was predicted a 5A. Such is life.

Hassled · 13/05/2009 17:57

DS2, also predicted 5A, also cocked it up - wrote a letter rather than a report. He doesn't know he cocked it up though (his teacher is a friend - she said loads of them struggled with it), and I'm saying nothing for now.

katiestar · 13/05/2009 18:18

Not to worry .I expect the papers will get lost anyway

Ds said the reading one was more difficult than the ones they'd practised.He said he was really tired too ,it is being a long hard week !!

mrz · 13/05/2009 18:26

The Long writing task KS" was a report about a pair of trainers on trial from a sports shop (which is still weighted towards boys IMHO)

mrz · 13/05/2009 18:30

The reading paper was a series of letters to/from? a boy who had left home to live in a tree house some children failed to see the "humour" in the letters.

rachels103 · 13/05/2009 20:30

There was a lot of guidance in the longer writing about what they could include, and those with imagination could use it (one boy in my class wrote about the incredible material that changes depending on the conditions).

It gave good structure for those without the creative writing skills - I thought it was a fair one. A lot better than last year's anyway and at least it was clear what they needed to do.

Why worry anyhoo - it's done now!

rachels103 · 13/05/2009 20:30

There was a lot of guidance in the longer writing about what they could include, and those with imagination could use it (one boy in my class wrote about the incredible material that changes depending on the conditions).

It gave good structure for those without the creative writing skills - I thought it was a fair one. A lot better than last year's anyway and at least it was clear what they needed to do.

Why worry anyhoo - it's done now!

hohoba · 13/05/2009 20:31

no it was just " the game"
apparently

not a computer game

ds2 wrote abotu a game they play in the yard

mrz · 13/05/2009 20:40

hohoba what year is your son in? As the KS2 SAT writing was about trainers.

hohoba · 13/05/2009 20:43

ah yes sorry, am dullard, year three
as you were!

Original poster
orangetulip · 14/05/2009 11:05

OK - apparently there was a choice - PC games or trainers or 'a book or something ?'....

So I was an idiot to even post this question in the first place .. still it's an interesting discussion

OP posts:
Fennel · 14/05/2009 11:15

Phew, so we could write about a book instead? Such a relief. Despite hints about how to make trainers reviews interesting I couldn't manage it.

Am really hoping that KS2 sats are scrapped in the next couple of years anyway so my dc don't have to do them.

Original poster
orangetulip · 14/05/2009 11:33

Couldn't agree more - what upsets me is the way my DS talks more about how many points you get for using different types of punctuation in different ways than how you use it in the first place , if you get my drift.
I'm all for having their progress measured, and a solid grounding in the core subjects, but I can't help finding it a bit narrow.

OP posts:
Robespierre · 14/05/2009 11:36

That annoys me, too. At my secondary school parents' evening the English teacher droned on and on about how many points for this and that. She isn't teaching English, she is teaching exam-passing. This is in Y9, for which they have just got rid of SATS, but the culture is still wrecked by testing obsession. It is soul destroying.

Original poster
orangetulip · 14/05/2009 11:41

Yup - and if you ask for something like a list of decent reading books for Age X, it's difficult to get - not strictly required for National Curriculum therefore 'not important'...

OP posts:
MillyR · 14/05/2009 12:21

To clarify, there was no choice in the KS2 sats. The long writing task was about trainers. There is never a choice. All children do the same task.

RustyBear · 14/05/2009 12:32

Definitely agree with MillyR - if your son is in Year 6 in a state school and doing KS2 SATs he did not have a choice what to write about - it was definitely a report on trainers.

If he's in a private school, or not in Year 6, they don't actually have to do SATs anyway, so they could have been given a choice - though it seems a bit odd that one of the choices would have been the same as the official paper.

fleacircus · 14/05/2009 12:35

Aah, look forward to the Anthology when they get to GCSE then. The embarrassingly transparent thinking is "Boys, they like violence, don't they... so let's make sure at least half the poems feature a murder..."

stillenacht · 14/05/2009 12:38

robespiere - agree most definitely and i am a secondary teacher - my kids definitely do there work 'to the test'

eg add a modulation in your composition you will get higher marks

instead of using oom pah pah in the bass in the waltz vary it to arpeggios in the second section and then back again

and many many more....

It is composing by numbers...

stillenacht · 14/05/2009 12:39

their

hideous hideous error

singersgirl · 14/05/2009 13:23

DS1's teacher said she taught her 'Level 5s' to go back over their writing to see if they could add in any more sophisticated punctuation or sentence structure. Have I got a semi-colon? Tick. Parenthetic commas? Tick. At least three connectives? Tick. Have I started a sentence with an adverb? Tick.

It's so....pointless. Punctuation should be there to make sense of the writing, not added to get more points.

stillenacht · 14/05/2009 13:32

whats a parenthetic comma?????

Have never needed it teaching A level music

katiestar · 14/05/2009 13:48

For any parents of Y6s

had to pick DD1 up sick from school at lunchtime.Sought out the yr 6s who said this mornings maths was a piece of cake.phew

Rhubarb · 14/05/2009 14:00

Mixed feelings about the maths. A lot of ours who are good at maths, didn't finish the mental maths because they panicked and tried to rush.

The paper maths was ok. Luckily we'd covered everything that was in there, in our classes. But I know there were one or two questions in there I didn't bloody know!

mrz · 14/05/2009 17:49

orangetulip which year is your child in?

Swipe left for the next trending thread