Advice appreciated from Year 7 English teachers.

[SuperRainbows]

Dd 10 is home educated(Y5). She is going to secondary school in September 2018.

I follow the National Curriculum in English. Dd's reading age is 12.10. She loves reading, has excellent comprehension and is a super speller and writer.

The one aspect of the NC I hardly touch is the obscure elements of the grammar that have recently been added and I'm wondering if these feature much in Y7.

I'm not an English teacher so can't help with that, but as a languages teacher my preference would be that all children know basic grammar. NOT the mad, Gove-inflicted lunacy of all the minute details they will never need again after Year 6 SATS, but it is very helpful to know what is a noun, adjective, verb, tense, adverb, pronoun etc.

Yes, because of the requirements for the new GCSE we have become much more focused on grammar. But not as much as the KS2 tests are. I'd expect a year seven to know the word classes, different types of sentence structures and their effects, adverbial and noun phrases, a range of literary devices (simile etc) and how to structure paragraphs. We would start from the assumption they'd been taught this but would still review it as part of the teaching.

Thank you. Both replies are reassuring.

We cover grammar in the way you both describe, but not to the extent required for the KS2 test.

DD1 is in yr8. DD2 has just done the yr6 SATS.
DD1 says most of the obscure grammar they were taught in yr6 which DD2 was battling through this year, have never been seen nor mentioned since. utter lunacy.

Thanks for replying nocampinghere. This is what I suspected would be the reality.
Dd likes English, but this aspect would be so tedious.

DD2 is finishing y7, she has been having some English intervention.

They have recently covered subordinate clauses again in the intervention, but focussing on punctuating correctly, making the writing more flowing and comprehensible rather than the technical side.

I think it makes sense to encourage correct, more advanced punctuation through personal writing in secondary school.

It's the jumping through hoops aspect of ks2 that I find frustrating.

I wouldn't worry about it. It sounds like she's doing really well in English -- and if she gets to secondary and suddenly needs some grammar terms, you can go on the internet and learn them!

Does she speak another language? Will she be learning one at secondary? Grammar might be important for that: it will help you a great deal if you understand subject, verb, object, pronoun etc.

Thank you Bungled.

She is learning French.

Grammatical knowledge will be expected at secondary. I expect my y7s to come up being able to confidently identify all the terms on the ks2 spag test and use that as base knowledge for moving into applying linguistic knowledge to analyse literature. That means I don't go back to asking them to label determiners or SVO but I would expect them to identify word/sentence types accurately so I can teach analysis.

That said, I'm not an idiot and know some secondary English teachers don't come back to those terms (which is a shame because it actually works as a great platform to stretch the children).