Does a child's lack of participatioin in whole class activites automaticallyy mean,,,,,,,

[FAQinglovely]

that they're not making an effort?

I'm in 2 minds about this.

DS1 all through infant school has never been keen on contributing to whole class discussions, he's been fine in small groups and one to one with other pupils and teachers, but whole class has just been something he doesn't like to do.

I never like it when I was a child either.

His report which I've just got he's been given an "acceptable" for effort, with lots of comments dotted through it for about his lack of contribution in whole class discussioins.

Do you think it's possible for a child to make a good effort at school without this whole class contribution??

I don't think it's fair that it's being picked up on in such a negative way - surely there are always going to be people who aren't comfortable in large group situations - but still work hard?

Or is contributing in large group discussions a vital thing that I've somehow missed the point of?

but from 20% of work complete it was blatantly obvious to me that getting up to 80-90% of work an effort had been made.

Ok so he's still not the quickest worker - but blimey effort has been made on his part to improve.....and his maths teacher (didn't one from his other subjects) did say he'd improved and was working harder.

You know what - if it's not part of a GSCE that he's going to have to take (doing whole class presentations) then really I'm not going to worry about it.

Not every child wants to go into business - I'm sure if he does decide he wants to go into business work he'll have to work hard at doing presentations in front of people.

I didn't expect an excellent - but I thought at least an improved effort at completing work was "good" - not "barely making an effort". Even his class teacher said that his slow work was due to the effort he put into his neatness (which he incidentaly received a certificate for for "most improved handwriting")

Surely effort isn't now measured on how good they are at something - but how hard they've tried?

But how is whole class presentations good practice for interviews? Most jobs don't have a huge panel of people interviewing you!

Anyhow, as I said the whole report is full of contradictions, and I've been wholly unimpressed with his teacher all through school year so I'm just going to draw a line under this report and see what next year with a good teacher brings.

and btw - in case you think I was expecting a perfect report for him - I certainly wasn't - based on his behaviour at home (plenty of threads about it from me on here) I would have been just as at an outstanding report.

I just expected a fair and accurate report that didn't also contradict itself.

oh but there was one bit that made me chuckle to myself this morning at church apparently his ICT skills are "improving" but he was lots of room for improvement.

I left him setting up the laptop, connecting it to the projector, changing the powerpoint presentation that was being used within a very user unfriendly song presentation programme so that it wasn't on loop. He then operated the computer during the entire service on his own, then afterwards shut it down properly, including saving teh changes made and put it away . He's not great at anything really - apart from perhaps his IT skills LOL.