What is your child learning/doing in Reception at the moment? Thread 2

[wheelsonthebus]

My dd - who could read a bit before starting reception - has gone 'back to basics', to the extent that her classes involve how to pronounce letters (ie 'p' sounds like puh and the sound involves blowing air out of your mouth onto your finger. 'a' sounds like the 'a' in ant which crawls up your arm). I am a bit bemused as to why children are being taught actions to go with sounds. Why not just 'a is for apple' without all the pics of a child crunching into one?
I am sure other reception classes are onto more advanced things than this. What is your child doing in reception at the moment?

choccyp1g - yes I mean nursery rhymes, sound lotto games, rhyming games, alliteration silly sentences, poems, choruses etc. Not really this is how to hold a book but all the other oral skills. And yes, the overwhelming majority of our children have not had nearly enough of these early literacy experiences. We sang 'Old King Cole' today. One child knew it. They loved being the king and calling for his pipe etc and especially enjoyed pretending to be the fiddlers three and making lots of different violin type sounds. It's really quite common for children to have missed out on these early experiences. Ours is a fairly middle of the road area. Not posh but not overly deprived either. Our reading scores speak for themselves.

Choccyp1g - my school is in a highly deprived area and very few of the children have any experience of reading/being read to, sung to, rhyming, playing with sounds, making marks/writing etc. Our reading and writing scores are incredibly low.

My school is also in an area of high social/economic deprivation. Children arrive with very little if any speech/language and we achieve above national average in reading and writing attainment.

DS started reception unable to read anything except his name, he could recognise letters and he could write his name. By the sounds of it on here that makes me seem a bad parent!!!!!! BUT, he is very socially aware, is a sponge to general knowledge & querky facts, visits galleries & mueseums and is fascinated by ancient rome.... there is a whole lot more for them to learn.

Using JP (at first I was sceptical) he is bounding along, bonding letters well & enjoying reading and writing. There is a lot more to JP that doing 'funny actions'.
My DS has just gone into Yr1 and they have been streamed on ability and now have work groups, each group gets spellings every week (spellings vary in difficulty for each group).

Your children only have one year in reception...let them enjoy it ! They learn through play, they sing the 'bean' song, they absorb so much - I think there is so much more to learn in reception than counting to 100 and getting up to Level 3 in ORT !!..the time will come when your children will be separated by ability and personally I feel Yr1 is still too early for that !

x

Thanks to the teachers for coming back on my question, I hope it didn't sound sarcastic. It was meant as a genuine question, my point being that even in a relatively deprived class, there will be some who are already reading well, and having done all this stuff at home and pre-school. Is it really fair on them (or good for their attitude) to sit through stuff they know backwards?

I am doing volunteer reading with some (generally struggling ones) in DS class, (Yr4) and notice that one or two of them seem to be able to read "words" but not actually make much sense of the stories. The trouble is, the stories they CAN read, are a bit boring for 8 year-olds.

The teacher just leaves me to it (I think on the grounds that DS is doing well, so I must know what I'm doing ), and so I have tended to go back to some of what I used to do with DS when he was younger.
For example, reading poems to them, and pausing for them to complete the rhyming word, asking them to tell me the story so far, guessing what might happen next etc.

Hope I am doing it right. The children are also getting extra help from a specialist. I've just had an inspiration, I should probably have a chat to her, rather than the class teacher.

My DS was young for his year and could not read any words when he started Reception. There were several children in his class who had learned to read before they started school. Some had been to a private montessori pre-school where they had been taught how to read; others were old for their year and had picked it up at home. Funnily enough, DS is now in year 3 and in the top reading group. None of those early readers in reception is in the top group. Fantastic that your child is doing well in reception, but do remember she is only 4. Those DC you assume are holding your child back may be streets ahead of her in a few years time.