Author: berkocat

Learning by stealth: the antidote to modern education

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My recent blog post about the abysmally depressing focus upon quantifiable results and the effect this has had upon education, particularly in the primary sector, where it is least appropriate, got me thinking:  ‘How can a parent who doesn’t want to spend vast amounts of time at home drilling children in phonics and partitioning, still support and encourage learning?’ I came up with this list of 4 fairly simple activities which don’t take an awful amount of time and – most importantly – don’t really feel like work.

  1. Read, read, read! This is hardly revelatory, but there really is a huge difference in progress between those children who are regularly read to/with at home and those who aren’t. It doesn’t have to be every night: I read my children’s school books with them every night but mainly because I think it’s better to focus upon reading 4 pages every night than it is to try to do 12 pages a couple of times a week. You don’t need to complete a whole book a night: little and often is best. Often those children who are made to read a lot every night and quickly whiz through reading levels don’t actually properly comprehend what they are reading and reading becomes merely a mechanical exercise, not a true exercise in understanding. So, as well as trying to focus on little and often, also ask your child questions about what they are reading to check their understanding. Most children love being asked their opinion on something. Questions don’t have to be deep and meaningful but can be as simple as ‘What do you think about X’s character?’ ‘What do you like about this story?’ ‘Can you tell me what’s happened so far?’ Moreover, reading shouldn’t be limited to school books, or even books in general. Take the opportunity to read wherever and whenever you are: road signs, shop signs, cereal packets and so on. Most of this is often child-initiated, which leads me on to my second point…
  2. Naturally Occurring Learning. This is where primary children seem to earn at a great pace, without being conscious that what they’re doing is learning. Examples of this are when children seek out knowledge for themselves – as in the ‘signs’ example above – which they do all the time. There are, however, ways to encourage this further, whilst still leaving it to the child to take the lead. At home, we eat our breakfast and tea sitting at a table in our kitchen. On the kitchen wall – amongst other things – is a clock and a 100 square. Occasionally, I will ask my 6 year old, ‘What time is it now?’ but more often than not, he will ask me, every time we sit down: ‘is it half past four?’ ‘is it a quarter past twelve?’ At first, he was pretty stuck on his ‘past’ and ‘to’ times but now he’s on the ball every time. I admit, I did try to teach him at first, but he didn’t respond well –  (‘Mummy, I’m just not listening to you!’) –  so I left him to his own devices and he figured it out himself. The same happened with both my children and the 100 square. I didn’t say a word about it, just put it up (okay, my husband actually hung it up…) and let them notice it. Pretty soon, they started playing with it – my least favourite game being ‘Mummy, guess which number I’m staring at!’ – and learning as they went. Some days, they will ask each other to find one more or one less than a number – ‘playing teacher’ –  and my little girl likes counting in 5s down the square. I love this because it’s a pretty lazy way of learning with them and takes no extra time out of an already jam-packed schedule. But most importantly, it’s child-initiated and it’s fun.
  3. Mother’s little helper. One thing both my children like to do is ‘helping’. This often isn’t so great: yesterday, for example, they were both keen to help with the weeding, which apparently involves depositing large amounts of mud all across the driveway and then going in after 10 minutes to watch Dr. Who. However, ‘helping’ can also be harnessed in a much more constructive way: my four year old often likes to help me write a shopping list – particularly when there’s something she desperately wants me to buy – and this can be a good opportunity to practise the dreaded phonics and writing without it seeming too much of a chore. Ask your child to chose one item they’d like to have on the list and then ask them to think of the letter sound it starts with and to write it down if they can. Once you’re in the shop, ask them to help you read the signs and to look for particular items. They can also count fruit into bags, look for numbers on the checkouts or even select coins to pay for a treat. All this, under the guise of ‘helping’ – by now, my children must think I am a spectacularly incompetent parent – seems to go down well. This can be repeated any number of times with other tasks: sorting and counting washing, baking a cake and – my favourite – sharing out Smarties equally at treat time.
  4.  Have fun with words. Essentially, learn to play with language. Children mostly don’t need to be taught this, as it’s what they do all the time, but us adults usually have to re-learn it. A variation of the ‘headband’ game can be great for this: make paper ‘headbands’ for each person and then make cards with types of animals or types of food, or items of clothing, etc., etc. on them and then stick each card on a headband. The person wearing the headband won’t know what word they’re ‘wearing’ so will have to ask questions to guess. Some of these questions can be focused upon letter sounds, or the number of letters in a word, or what a word rhymes with. Other ideas that have worked for us include exploring ‘nonsense’ language – the Lewis Carroll poem ‘Jabberwocky’ is a long-standing favourite for this and never seems to fail, particularly if you let children make up their own ‘nonsense’ words – and also exploring children’s poetry, which is often neglected. A favourite from my childhood – and now in its 30th anniversary year – is Allan Ahlberg’s ‘Please Mrs Butler’ which has the added bonus of containing subversive re-writings of school hymns. And the best thing? You don’t need to do anything with these poems other than read aloud and enjoy.

Overall, the most important point is that none of these activities should really   seem like you or your child is doing work. I doubt that any of them would be government-approved approaches for use in school and that is entirely the point…

 

 

Back to school

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It’s been a long time – 10 months according to my blog stats – since I have done more than merely contemplate writing another post. Instead, with both children now at school, I’ve immersed myself in re-learning how to teach after 6 years off from the profession: not this time as a teacher, but as a TA (with a little bit of teaching thrown in …!) at my children’s lower school.

When I left teaching  to be a full-time mother, I had begun to fall out of love with the job. I say ‘job’ and not ‘profession’ because I believe that the profession of teaching is and always will be an honourable and exciting one: working with children and young people who make every day different and challenging, trying to inspire a love of knowledge and exploration that will be life-long and in turn being challenged, inspired and constantly surprised by the children you work with. However, this was no longer the job that I found myself doing. There was little or no choice in what could be taught in the classroom: where I taught – in an Upper school – the curriculum in Years 10-13 was dictated by GCSE and A Level syllabuses and in Year 9 by the abysmal SATS. Not only was professional judgement restricted by external tests, but – because of the pressure put on schools – it was also ham-strung by various internal assessment tests, which meant that I felt like some kind of glorified data-entry clerk.

Moreover, the tests produced the kind of data which was easy to reproduce in graphs and tables and percentages. Try fitting ‘James has worked hard this term to improve his spelling and punctuation. To improve further, he now needs to support all his points with evidence from the text’ into a spreadsheet, then convert it into a some kind of quantifiable score. Oh, and then remember that James lives in house with two parents who have mental health issues and he gets up every night to see to his baby brother when his parents aren’t able to. Quantify that.

I don’t know if I expected primary education to be different. If I’d really thought about it, I’d have probably realised that it was unlikely to have escaped the endless onslaught of quantification. It hasn’t. Phonics – although not without its merits in the very early stages of reading and writing – is beloved of governments because of its easily quantifiable nature. How many letter sounds/digraphs does a child know? Can they blend and segment? Can they – my least favourite thing to do with phonics – identify ‘alien’ words and real words? Tick! Tick! Tick! Enter a  number in a spreadsheet and out comes verifiable progress (!)

This continues further up the school, where 6 and 7, 8 and 9 year olds are now required to identify parts of speech that most of my A Level students couldn’t identify – and some of which are still up for debate amongst professional linguists. Experiencing this as a parent as well as a teacher makes it both professionally and personally frustrating. I work in an amazing school, with committed and professional staff who teach lovely, creative and enthusiastic children. If only the ‘profession’ could be treated as ‘professionals’ – people who are more than capable of designing, implementing and assessing their own curriculum. Perhaps then we would view government interference in the curriculum with the same shock and aversion as we would do if they suddenly started telling doctors what to prescribe their patents and measuring their progress by how quickly they recovered from bouts of ‘flu or chicken pox.

At the moment, government and –  because of the way this ‘trickles down’ – a significant proportion of the general public, view the teaching profession in a similar way to my six year old who, when I referred to what I did as ‘work’ said, ‘That’s not work! You don’t work, Mummy. Daddy goes to work.’ Clearly a future politician in-waiting…

Starting school: The (terrified) parents’ guide…

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BackToSchool

Nervous about starting school in September? Worried how you’ll cope with a new routine and different faces? Scared about the demands and expectations that will be placed upon you? Then chances are, you’re probably a parent, not a child. Whilst a child’s first day at school is a huge milestone for parents, for most children it’s as big a deal as their parents choose to make it. We run around buying uniform, attending information evenings, having earnest chats with our children’s prospective teachers about why our child in particular is a special case and on the day itself we take photographs,  say anxious goodbyes in the classroom and walk around for the rest of the day feeling like we’ve lost a limb. Worse still, with our modern-day tendency to think, where previous generations would just have done, we torment ourselves by reading studies which helpfully suggest that: summer-born children will be adversely affected by starting school ‘early’/those parents who don’t read enough with their children are condemning them to a life of illiteracy/we must have a thorough and detailed knowledge of the merits of synthetic phonics versus ‘look and say’ before our child sets foot over the threshold of the classroom. I’ll save the rant about our modern-day obsession with ‘knowledge’ for another blog. Suffice it to say, that if we were as adept at assessing the quality and validity of the studies we read as we are at scaring the hell out of ourselves with them, then we would all be much happier human beings.

My son started school in a reception class at our local Lower School last September. And no – I’m not claiming that I walked him to school on his first day with some sort of Zen-like calm. Did I have doubts about his ability to cope with this? Yes. Was I worried for him? Yes. Did my stomach feel as if a hundred wriggling, writhing worms had taken up residence? Yes. My son’s only experience of any care outside the family up until his entrance to school was 3 mornings a week at the local pre-school. Until he began school he had never done a full day, never had the experience of eating lunch away from home, and still needed my help to dress himself in the mornings. So I worried about him going hungry, changing for P.E., going to the toilet – all the usual things.

Was my son worried? He certainly didn’t appear to be. I expected tears (to this day, there have been none), refusal to go (the most I have ever got is a jokey ‘I don’t want to go to school today’) and anxiety. What I got was tiredness (to be expected), a little grumpiness for the first half term and overall a boy who seemed happy and settled. True, my son had the advantage of moving up to reception class with nearly all the children he knew from our village pre-school, but in other ways he was probably less prepared than your average 4 year-old, in that he had been largely at home with me since the day he was born.

So what is being in a reception class like? Well, much has been written in the press recently about how in this country we force children to start school too young. This time last year, full of fears for my son, I might even have agreed with this point of view. And whether you agree with this statement or not really depends on how we define formal schooling. In my son’s school, reception class is part of the main school, but in some schools it can take place in a quite separate building. Either way, the curriculum followed is quite separate. If you have been sending your child to a pre-school or to a private nursery prior to them starting  school then the curriculum they follow in reception class is merely a continuation of this. They continue to follow the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) and don’t begin to follow the National Curriculum until they are in Year 1. Granted, they attend all day, every day, but many children in private nurseries already have experience of this and those that don’t – as my son didn’t – tend to adapt fairly quickly.

Through volunteering in my son’s class, I have been able to experience what a reception class day is like and it’s pretty far away from the idea of ‘formal schooling’ that I had this time last year. My son’s class will start the day by finding their name tags – this has now progressed to writing their names – and then sitting down on the mat to register. They answer their names, give their lunch preferences – packed or school dinners, meat or vegetarian. Then there’s time for show and tell, based around their current topic. They then have a short amount of whole class teaching – phonics or numeracy – before breaking off into small groups to work on a play-based learning activity. Last week, the group I was in charge of were playing bingo – cue much shouting and laughter – but in previous weeks we have been drawing numbers on chalk in the playground, filling up beakers with water and sand to learn about ‘capacity’, making shapes out of straws and opening up a ‘play shop’ for the rest of the class. Most of the time, the children aren’t really aware they’re learning: they’re far too busy having fun.

After their group-based activity, the children are allowed ‘choosing time.’ This means exactly what it says: they can play inside – dolls, Lego, listening to music, watching birds from the window – or outside – climbing frame, slide, scuttle-bugs, ball games. They can even go and visit friends in the other reception class if they chose to. This pattern is repeated pretty much throughout the days and weeks. Yes, there are ‘assessments’ of reading and numeracy but the children aren’t aware these are taking place. They laugh, they play, make friends, fall out with friends, learn to share, and, yes, somewhere in all that they may also learn to read and write. To my eyes, it appeared to happen by osmosis, by magic, but I think it’s probably down to the skill of the teachers…

So, what I’m trying to say is don’t worry. Of course you will worry, but trust me – reception year is as far from formal schooling as driving a car is from flying a fighter jet. Oh, and I say this as the mother of a girl who will be starting reception class this September, who was born on August 30th, scraping into the academic year by just 24 hours and who was ‘meant’ to be a September-born baby…

For those who prefer practical action to worry, here are some things you can do:

1) If you haven’t already done so, visit your child’s school. If possible, ask to sit in on a reception class to see what type of expectations will be placed on your child . Most of us will have no memories of what school was like at this age and this should help to reassure you!

2) Try not to pass any worries you have onto your child. Most parents view starting school as such a milestone that we have the potential to create anxieties in our children where there were none. Pretty much, children will respond to situations the way they see us do. So by all means, take pictures, make an occasion of buying school shoes, but don’t spend the summer constantly talking about school in the hopes that this will prepare your child, when all it will probably do is alert them to your anxiety.

3) If your child isn’t transferring to school with children they already know, then it may be worthwhile trying to organise a play-date with a child who will be in their class, so they have at least one familiar face. You will usually meet other parents at some sort of information evening before school breaks up for the summer.

4) Don’t worry if your child can’t write or read before they start: this is what school is for! Some nurseries or pre-schools do focus on these skills, but my son’s didn’t – largely because his school teaches cursive and prefers a ‘clean slate’ to work with! As a result, my son arrived in September, able only to write a ‘w’ for his name. Now, he can write beautifully (joined up – I am a most unexpected convert to the teaching of cursive!) and actually enjoys writing. He can read well and – most importantly – is completely unaware of having been ‘taught’ these skills.

5) You can, however, help your child – and their prospective teachers! – if you ensure that they are prepared in other ways for school. If your child doesn’t already do this, it may be a good idea to spend some time over the summer gradually getting them to dress and undress themselves, to take some responsibility for putting their clothes away and to learn how to wipe their nose (!) and use a shared toilet properly. It’s these self-care skills that will matter more to your child’s teacher than whether they can read or write come September. Children in my son’s class have to have responsibility for their coat and P.E. kit (putting them away, taking them home), their book bag and their water bottle. This will take time, things will get lost and forgotten and muddled up – my son and another boy spent most of the first term accidentally, repeatedly, swapping identical pairs of black, Clarks school shoes back and forth, until one of them had a growth spurt and changed sizes – but if they’re used to taking responsibility at home, then the transition will be much easier.

6) ….and RELAX. We all did it, we survived (and that was in the 70s and 80s, when our parents let us ride with no seatbelts and go out without sunscreen…) Thanks, Mum.  😉

I vote, therefore I am.

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As some of us may be aware, there is an election tomorrow. It seems like it’s been a lot longer than five years since the last once – possibly because the last time I voted in a general election I was pushing my brand new, 2-month old baby boy in his pram, whereas tomorrow I’ll be dropping him off at school, then walking his 3 and a half year old little sister to the polling station, where there’s a reasonable chance she’ll disrupt proceedings when I don’t let her use the chubby pencil to make her own marks on the ballot paper…

My vote tomorrow will largely be ‘wasted’ in the purely political sense: we’ve moved house since the last election and now instead of the excitement of a marginal seat, we have the iron-clad, locked-tight certainty of Tory-voting, I’m-alright-Jack villages to contend with in our new constituency. Not much – if any –  chance of an upset here, unless UKIP manage to grab a few votes from the disgruntled right. The did look like they were staging some kind of invasion last week when they parked an ex-army jeep in the centre of the village, slap-bang in the middle of the home-time school run…And in addition, I know that my husband will visit the ballot box at some time tomorrow, directly cancelling out my vote.Love is indeed a beautiful and mysterious thing…

So why am I writing this post? Well, because despite all of the above points, I have never considered not voting. To me, not voting seems to be the equivalent of not actually existing as a  person, of saying  that you have nothing valid to contribute. This campaign – more so than others I can recall – seems to have been full of apathy from a vocal minority of the general public. I’m not sure that this apathy is genuine:  I don’t think that people really don’t care –  it’s just that it’s much easier to pretend that you don’t care, because then you don’t have to do anything. Statement such as ‘Well, they’re all the same’, ‘There’s not one of them you can trust’ are very, very easy to say and – frankly – it’s a cop out. Untrustworthy some of them may be, but would you vote for them if they told you the cold, hard truth that you claim to want so badly? We get the  politicians that we deserve and if perhaps as an electorate we were a little more sophisticated and realistic then we might hear the truth more often. Not a political animal? I think you are. Do you use the NHS?  Care about the quality of our social care and housing?  Worry about your child’s education? Moan about taxes? Then you are political.

I’m aware of being something of a hypocrite as I write this post. You see, I’ve spent the past month or so ‘thinning ‘ out my newsfeeds after they seem to have become overrun with people trying to a) convert me to some form of religion they have newly discovered (I’m happy you’re happy, but you’re not getting this girl) b) tell me that there is one way to raise a healthy child and one way only (always from a sector of the middle class new hippy movement) or c) convince me that (yet again) there are razors on the underground escalator handrails or if someone flashes you in their car it’s a new kind of crazy gang initiation (please, people, snopes.com before you post – unless, of course, you actually like believing that crap…) So, I’m a hypocrite; I dislike being told what to do, and yet I’m telling you to vote. Please. Would you? Thank you. (And yes, that goes for those of you voting for the bat-shit crazy parties too) That’s how much I believe in the democratic process.

5 ways to help your child learn to read (without them even realising)

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As an English teacher and the mother of a boy in reception class, I know how hard it can be to strike the balance between supporting your child – and their teacher – with their early learning and becoming the sort of scary, deranged tiger-Mummy that teachers dread meeting on consultation days. Here are just 5 things – as both a mother and a teacher –  that I have found to be useful:

1. Don’t ‘help them with their reading’

Never ask your child to sit down and ‘do his/her reading with you’. This is likely to engender the same emotional response as someone asking me to sit through 90 minutes of grown men passing a ball back and forth to each other’s feet, as well as the same slim chance of it actually happening. The main thing wrong with this approach is that it treats reading as if it were some kind of separate activity – something that is divorced from the child’s every day life – instead of something which should be an integral part of it. (though if you do make this beginner’s error and are met with the same response I was: ‘Noooo! Never!’ the situation can be remedied by asking the child’s 3 year old sister if she would like to practise her letter sounds.) Because sometimes, just sometimes,  sibling rivalry works in your favour…

2. Try to protect ‘reading for pleasure’

This can be tough early on, when they know so few words.Most schools will provide some sort of reading log or journal, which is sent home with a book/s and phonics cards and this means that even at this early stage there is some expectation for parents to sit down with their child to ‘practise’ what they have learnt that week. In my experience, it is best to do this – from the child’s perspective – as informally and unconsciously as possible.

My child’s school sends home two books each week: one is usually from the Oxford reading scheme and one is a book that the child has chosen his/herself from their classroom. So, if your child – like mine – has books sent home every week from school, I tend to leave the ‘learning reading’ book in the bag and enjoy the ‘story’ book together. This way, my son will happily ‘read’ the words he knows when he has chosen the book himself and enjoys the story. Moreover, it gives him the added motivation to learn more, as he sees the link between reading and pleasure. Most schools will read the ‘learning reading’ book with each child once a week at school and the scintillating antics of Mum Bug – if you’re not yet familiar with this, then you’re in for a treat –  and her bag only seem to stretch so far…! Doing this hopefully ensures that the reading you and your child share is always something that they enjoy, rather than a chore.

3. Play lots of games and keep it casual

We all know that children learn best through play, when learning is not a conscious activity. Primary teachers – particularly those in the earliest years – recognise this and most learning in reception classes and Year 1 takes place through play-based activities. Parents sometimes forget this when it comes to helping their children with reading, so here are a few words and sounds based activities which I have found my little boy is more than willing to engage with:

* Phonics treasure hunt – use phonics flash cards (letter sounds) to make a treasure hunt around the house. Children can use the cards to make CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words when they have completed the hunt. (NB: real treasure – of the chocolate-based variety – was an essential in our house when we played this game…)

* Out and about/phonics eye spy – Ask your child to look out for objects that begin with a certain letter sound whenever you go out. You could pick one sound each trip and just focus upon that, or mix it up a bit with different sounds. A phonics-based eye spy is also a good alternative.

* Go fish – The old, gold, favourite game works well with magnetic plastic letters and mini fishing rods. You can ask them to fish for specific sounds and then use them to spell out CVC words.

*Bath phonics – use bath pens to write letters and sound them out and then spell out CVC words. (Apologies, this is a messy one…!)

*Whiteboard – have a whiteboard in a communal space with magnetic letter sounds or key words. Let the child explore this themselves without direction unless they ask for help. A nice, fat marker pen always seems to help entice them…!

*iPad – for those of you who don’t disapprove of the inevitable combination of iPads and under 5s there are some clever apps out there that can help children learn. In our house we love the Alphablocks app and Jolly Phonics letter sounds. Again, this works best if you just leave them on the iPad without mentioning they’re there (and it also saved me from hearing a few hundred renditions of Princess Sofia and her bloody princess bloody perfect slumber party) Apparently, that’s not the official name of the app…

4. Don’t start too early

I have friends who started introducing phonics to their children before they started school. I didn’t – largely at the time because I was unsure of how my son’s school would teach it and wanted to avoid any possible confusion – and my son attended a preschool who had a child-led policy of only introducing letter sounds if a child showed a curiosity about reading. It was only after attending a phonics evening at my son’s school and helping out in his classroom that I actually felt as if I had an understanding of how they would approach early reading. Although phonics is a pretty universal – though not uncontroversial – strategy, each school may approach it in a slightly different way, so it’s important to know that any work you do with your child is supporting the teacher’s work, rather than causing confusion.

5. Relax…

Learning to read is not unlike all those other milestones that mothers parents like to beat themselves up over: learning to talk, learning to walk, potty training, sleeping through…Yes, they will get there. No, it’s not a indicator of wider intelligence. Like anything else we try get our children to do, a gentle approach is best, or we risk putting them off for life. So let’s give ourselves a break and remember: reading is a life-long pleasure, not a skill to be measured.