School Days – times tables tests

With only a week to go until half term, all the extra parent invite events are kicking off again. Each term the penultimate week is the church service, then the last day of term is always open morning and then target assembly where they get certificates if they’ve reached the level.

It’s always a lot of parental asks to attend everything. This week I totally forgot about church until the day before which meant it was too late to work out working from home so I could go. At least I’ll be able to go to open morning, although it doesn’t look like N’s got his next level target this time, so I’m let off attending that assembly.

Here’s this week’ school days.

Posh buses

N is so funny about going on any trip with school. It’s all about the coaches. This week for swimming, the bus company had sent a posher coach than normal. N was so excited about it, ‘it was posh mummy, it had a toilet and smarter seats, and a footrest with padding on it’.

He’s now trying to anticipate the sort of bus they’ll be going on for their class trip next week.

Reading book levels

Reading book levels are tiresome. It doesn’t help that they’re confusing across all the different book schemes, but it’s also hard to know where your child is for their age. N has been on level 8 since about November and we’d got onto decent plots and stories that were getting to basic chapter style too. It felt like he was progressing nicely.

Then the last couple of weeks, he’s been coming home with brown level books (Storyworlds ones). They seemed really simple and boring, were back to 16 pages. I couldn’t understand why he’d gone down 1-2 levels.

I love a reading journal for messages so there was a bit of back and forth between the TA and myself.  Thankfully I wasn’t the only parent to have been concerned about this – they were going to relook at the book boxes because it seemed that the book order had got mixed up. Phew. Hoping that next week we finally get N back on the books he should be reading.

His reading’s certainly come on well. He’s now willing to read a full book in one night because he knows he can get through it without sounding words out, and that it doesn’ take a long time. Hopefully when he goes back up to his original book level, he’ll have progressed that he gets on with the harder books fine.

Lunch time clubs

Last year N had been going to a couple of lunchtime clubs but this year they didn’t seem to be running. Parents must have fed back, so some have started again. Construction (Lego) club is back on which N likes, and they were meant to have started cross country club again this week. But it was just too wet after all the rain for the children to be running on the school field.

It seems N is happy to do these clubs again, but he definitely refused to sign up for french club.  It’s a shame because he did a little at both nurseries he went to, and knew a few things.  He’s forgotten much of it (apart from Bonjour) and I’d have liked to get him back into it, in readiness for starting Year 3 in September, which is when they start learning it in class. But no, french club clashes with Lego club, and N tells me he needs a break time to run around. Which is a fair point.

Instead, I need to get some french into him so that he can go and talk to the french baker we go to.

Time Tables

N’s been doing spelling tests for a couple of years now. But this week he brought home his first times tables test – 10 times table). They’ve been doing the 2, 5 and 10s for ages now, and he said they’ve started doing 3s and 4s properly too.

He knows his 10s really well, so hopefully he’ll get it right in the test.

How’ve your children been getting on this week in school?