Becky Allen calls for centralised primary teaching

[noblegiraffe]

Interesting blog post from Becky Allen (formerly of Education Datalab) discussing the issues with what primary school teachers are setting, the demands on parents and the actual learning that happens. rebeccaallen.co.uk/2020/04/29/parental-load-theory/

Her point that her kids enjoyed watching an educational CBeebies programme but didn’t actually learn from it is interesting. Teachers know that kids need repetition over days and weeks and questioning and testing to remember things, but one-off lessons don’t deliver this.

“It now seems very likely some (or most) parents will be asked to combine work and schooling of young children for many hours a week for a large part of the next academic year. It is an almost impossible ask and all the parents I know who are trying to do this are at the point of complete collapse. Our best hope of keeping these parents from breaking down completely is drop our commitment to having each school create and deliver their own school curriculum of home-learning tasks that were originally designed for the classroom. Instead, much as primary teachers may hate it, we must deliver to parents new resources that are crafted with parental load in mind, limiting the parental role to meaningful interactions for learning in a limited number of tasks rather than burdening us with activities that have high extraneous parental load.”

...”we need a fully-centralised week-by-week National Primary Curriculum for the 2020/21 academic year.”

Other countries would think it bonkers that this isn’t already in place.

Wow what an interesting discussion. I am a parent to a y2. I just don't understand why we can't have workbooks to work through.
But if it's a Tory decentralised make lots of 'consultants' rich thing then that makes me mad!
Can it not be child led? So depressing.

I've found workbooks on the secret classroom website, link from the government links list. Finally a workbook for each week, with a parents answers pack.

Also, we may have a further lockdown in winter so may have to navigate through all
this again.

Yes career, it's seems highly placed. I was doing shorter stories like Dear Green Peace and the iron man as a longer whole term book in y2 in the past. Many schools would be choosing lower level books to work from around the country.

I've gone to the conclusion that creative literacy lessons linked to books etc are very hard to do at home as so much relies on interactive discussion in class and the way you all engage together. So much writing is then scaffolded carefully, drama, role play, guided writing, and I'd often change approaches depending on how they seemed to engage or what they picked up on.

It's better to read or have the stories read to you, and then do separate, discrete focuses on spag and comprehension which again can be from the text or in work book formats. Then a separate handwriting focus. You can work on understanding of character descriptions etc in workbooks.

As Rosen often asserts, and a lot of t4w is based on, simply hearing / reading being immersed in a huge array of stories and NF texts is enough to support that side of literacy at ks1 and 2.

. I assume a number of schools are using this time to develop their curriculum for next year.

Yep. Feels rather futile.

Howz I know many schools just purchased the CGP workbooks for children to work through.

Thanks I hadn't heard of CGP.
What do the levels translate to with English years is year 2? Thanks

Our school is going down the crappy links route, no workbooks.

Neuro I'm just using picture books because I can film myself reading them and at least there's something for them to look at! It's no way the same as what I would do in school as we're a T4W school but I've done lots of interactive activities like taking pictures from the book and adding speech bubbles for them to write or type on so they work is of a decent standard. We're using Seesaw which has been a godsend so in my opinion, what I am doing for my class is much better than a generic online lesson as I can tweak each lesson depending on what they submit. However, I completely understand that with schools just sending a load of generic links, something centralised would be better.

Well it's a full year of stuff to support each week for y2. After buying too many (but I will use them at work I'm sure) I think the 10 min work outs are great. Ds did one page in 5 mins so was chuffed. So in terms of consolidation around what they've done this year they're useful unless your child is working below. In which case the year below might be better, as a pp has said upthread.

Some are Sats prep books.

Howz The year 2 ones are generally SATS prep books so they're quite dry but they do the job. I would think the study ones are better than the test question books in these circumstances.

Seesaw is perfect for all this. It's also easily workable at the free level. That sounds perfect career! And v T4W anyway.

Others have mentioned Collins work books too.

Pearson especially aren’t going to make money out of a centralised curriculum.

They could do. I think it’s Pearson that owned the power maths books which align to White Rose. If you know every school is teaching Roman Britain in year 4, it’s easier to pitch your resources at the right level. It would open up a much wider range of schools that might buy from you than if half are doing it in year 4 and half in year 6.

DD's school is using Seesaw and it's fairly easy to use but it's fiddly (especially on a phone or Kindle), so we've had to print most things or we just waste hours and half the time DD accidentally deletes what she's done and has a meltdown. There also seems to be no way to close down the bright red ticker of how many activities are due, which is really stressing me out as a parent!

My own school are using Firefly which I prefer as it's easier to close down tasks.

The audio feedback on Seesaw is nice, although I'm listening to the feedback more than DD.

You can't beat a nice workbook. Their battery never fails, they don't delete themselves and they don't need a password.

So as a parent to a yr4 a yr1 and a preschooler, what workbooks would you suggest? I'm finding the worksheets emailed through from school are increasingly random, and would rather have a nice tidy workbook that gives progression.

This is the link to classroom secrets workbooks. A weekly book to work through. With parents notes & answers too. Best I've found. We are sticking to these now.

classroomsecrets.co.uk/free-home-learning-packs/

Love the Power Maths books, use them lots for same day intervention/catch up. We don't set homework, but if we did, I'd be taking stuff from those.

Howzabout - thanks. Do you think we could just jump in at week 2 or does week 1 need to be completed first?

You know where you'd do a class discussion on a book or a topic, are you mentioning this within work set? Because I can only set theory lessons, I can't show a video of me either.
I don't want my students to think my lessons are as dry as they are right now and I want them to look forward to going back. I'm asking them to be practical at home and send me pics of what they've done if they can (I teach food and textiles)
I'm mentioning at the start of each theory lesson I've sent out that we would have been talking about this in class. Is this the right thing to do?
My subject doesn't have a curriculum as such, but there are schemes I could follow.

I'm in Ireland. We have a much more prescribed curriculum and we use workbooks for most subjects ( maths, Irish, English , science, history, geography and religion.) Distance learning and teaching is quite easy. Every day the children get a video/ voice recording (or many workbooks actually have online resources to support each page ). They then complete the work and either the answers are given the next day or parents send in pictures of books to be corrected.

Children who are weaker have access to the SET who breaks the work down further or gives different work . No printing, no sending out packs and parents are very happy because most childen can work independently as they are used to the format of the workbooks.
They have continued learning in a similar fashion to school. I was heavily criticised here before for textbooks but they have been a godsend at a time like this.

Whynotme40 you can just download whatever you want, it's not a guided program