Year 5 / 6 spelling

[neolara]

I've just had a look at the spellings year 5 / 6 kids are expected to know. I'm a bit horrified. I know that as a 10 year old I would have only got about 5 right. Lots of the words look like they don't follow any particular pattern and just have to be learned. I'm interested in what percentage of your kids do you expect to be able to spell them all? What would count as a good score? An OK score?

Was it these?

My son is 11 and is a very good speller.....so he got them all right.

However, my year 6 group were tested on the first 20 words and someone got 3 and most got 9.

The expectations are very high for y6 this year and spelling is important for the SATS.

My DD is y5 and is doing these, 10 a week, as her spellings. She will always get 10, and probably could get 9/10 later on, but she is a very good speller. I teach secondary and a large number of mine wouldn't get many of these.

My Year 5 class would get barely any of these. I do have the lower ability literacy set but even so... 😁 They might be able to learn some of them for a weekly test but they've no chance of retaining them or using that kind of vocab in their writing. Ridiculous