Author: Mr Roundtree

At Scholes (Elmet) Primary, we like to keep inviting people into school to share their views on our strengths and areas to keep improving. It helps to get other people’s opinions.

This week, we welcomed a headteacher from another Leeds school, an outstanding school with a strong record of high attainment. She visited most classes in school, spending up to about 15 minutes observing the teaching and learning, talking with some children and checking out the learning environments.

Our visitor offered three key strengths of our school:

• Very good learning behaviour: pupils are ‘calm, settled and engaged’
• Teaching appeared to be all at least good with some outstanding practice
• Learning environments are attractive and well organised

She also suggested an area for improvement: to explore a distinct editing process to allow to guide pupils when editing and improving their writing. This is a useful recommendation and one that we’ll work on in our final term.

At Scholes (Elmet) Primary, we want to be a happy and healthy place to learn. That includes making sure our younger children, in Year 1 and Year 2, know the key number facts that will help to secure fluency in Maths now and in the future – facts like 3+4=?, 2+?=10 and 17+?=20.

Our Addition Facts guide provides a guide to what addition facts we expect pupils in Year 1 and Year 2 to know (the table might look confusing – please ask us if you’re unsure). The aim is for children to be secure by the end of Key Stage 1 – that’s the end of Year 2.

In a recent assessment, we can see some great progress made by our children in securing these facts.

Our Year 2 children scored is now 15.3 out of 20 in the Autumn term, with 63% of children got 15 or more questions right out of 20. They’ve made great progress – now, the average is 19.2 out of 20 and almost all (95%) scored 15 or more.

Well done, everyone! And thank you for supporting your child at home.

You may have read recently about government plans to introduce a times tables assessment for children in Year 4 – the ‘check’ will be compulsory in 2020. The cost of this new test is estimated to exceed £5.2million. Whether you think the new test to be necessary or useful, it goes without saying that children knowing their times tables can really help not only in Maths lessons but in everyday life.

We’ve been carrying out our own assessment of our pupils’ times tables recall for some time now, in the form of a short test of 25 questions each term. Pupils have recently done the Spring test – with great results!

Year 4:

By the end of Year 4, children are expected to be able to recall all multiplication and division facts up to 12 x 12 and our test checked 25 random facts.

Children scored an average of 20.7 out of 25 with 68% of children getting 20+ questions correct. Last year, the same children scored  only 13.3 as a class average, with only 20% reaching 20 or more. And we’ve still got one more term to improve further!

Year 5:

Our Year 5 children scored an average of 23.6 out of 25 and 91% got 20+ questions correct. This is a significant improvement on their performance in a similar test at the end of Year 4, when the average score was 17.7 and only 45% had a score of 20 or more.

Year 6:

As you might expect, our Year 6 children did even better. The average score in the recent test was 24.3 out of 25 and 95% of children scored 20 or more in the test – a really impressive result.

We’ll need to work harder to ensure our Year 4 children in 2020 are fully prepared for the times table assessment that is planned. However, it’s reassuring to know that our children in Year 5 and Year 6 keep improving their performance.

This spreadsheet can help your child test themselves – but before they do, practise together:

• count in things that link, like 2p coins for x2 and 5p coins for x5, and 4 wheels on a car so 4 wheels (1 car), 8 wheels (2 cars), 12 wheels (three cars) etc
• count forwards, backwards in 3s, 4s or whatever
• look for patterns in the times tables (like the digits all add up to 9 when you multiply by 9)

You might have heard about this news story this: UK parents help less with homework.

Parents in the UK are much less likely to spend more than an hour per day helping with their children’s homework compared with parents in other countries, a survey suggests.

A survey of 27,830 parents in 29 countries found only 11% of UK parents spent an hour per day helping their children, far behind 62% in India.

Our Homework Policy is designed to best meet the needs of our pupils and their parents / carers. To help, we refer to research on how effective homework is.

Our Talk Time homework is intended to promote good speaking and listening skills, and quite often to raise awareness of moral issues such as whether or not animals should be kept in captivity. To get the most from Talk Time homework, turn the telly off and have a conversation around the table whilst eating your evening meal – you don’t need to spend extra, separate time to support your child! Encourage your child to use ambitious words, useful phrases and full sentences. Some sentence structures that can work well are:

• What are your views on …?
• I hear what you’re saying. However, …
• That’s a good point, but …
• Furthemore, …
• In conclusion, …
• I believe that … because…
• Another reason is …

Creative homework is an opportunity for your child to choose whatever they want to demonstrate some learning. For example, I can show what I know about food chains. Your child could present all their learning in so many different ways, from a diagram with notes to a story or comic strip. Parents’ and carers’ role is to support, encourage, help… but never to take over and do the homework! So, there’s no need to sit down and do the homework with your child – you could be getting on with some other household task. The fact that your child and you and both actively doing something can be a really good way to promote positive attitudes.

The other type of homework is Practice makes perfect. The work should be fairly straightforward for the child as there should be no need for new learning, so just some encouragement from you is needed. However, it would be a great time to get your child to teach you – they should be able to explain the key points or processes! Also, you might want to check what your child has done – not a big job.

Don’t forget that the most important things you can do at home to support learning are to be positive and encourage your child, and to make sure they read regularly, practise their spellings and practise some simple Maths – counting, number bonds (to start with, two numbers that make 10, like 3+7) and their times tables.