Well, the Christmas holidays are now over and everyone is back to school or work. If you want to see some lovely mementos of the festive season, go to: ” https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/tgiuk “. Jack whose parents are from the Congo shares here some lovely insights into life at primary school and gives some good advice.
My primary school life by Jack aged 10
My name is Jack and I go to a school in the east of the city. Primary school life is difficult at times because of the exams. I am a bit scared of SATs in Year 6 because I don’t know if I am going to fail or pass. SATs are the end of year test to see if you are up to standard and they test English, Comprehension, Maths and Reading. These are the key subjects in the national curriculum 2016 (because the curriculum changes).
In Year 6 (the final year) at our school, you get to go on a five day residential trip and you get to do go-carting, rock climbing and rowing. I am looking forward to this.
The books that make you up to standard are: Alex Rider, Moby Dick, the Chronicles of Narnia and other classic books.
In the school hall, you get to go on the monkey bars and go on ropes. Also P.E. is about learning sports. My teacher did a club called curiosity club and he taught us Crab Basketball, that was the funnest game of the year. When we do Art, we normally use wet paint and we draw pictures and then paint them in, for example, we did a world war 1 painting of people in the trenches. We also got to tell the class what our background was, I am British and my parents are from the Congo.
I absolutely love science, I think its my strongest subject. We get to do investigations and see who has the right answer or the wrong answer in our groups. Last term, we did an investigation about shadows, we had to see if we pushed the rubber close to the torch, whether it would get smaller or bigger. Fortunately, our theories were right and we got 6 house points each. The answer was when you push the rubber forward,the shadow would get bigger as you are pushing the moon towards the sun.
Maths can be quite difficult at times because of algebra, we have to try and use our knowledge to decode the question, a stands for a missing number. Also, I don’t really understand ratio proportion but a useful tool is a maths dictionary.
English is my second strongest subject because you get to be imaginative in writing stories, every week we do a piece of extended writing which is hard work for all of us but we manage to do it.
My best memory of primary school is going to a farm in Year 2, because we got to touch and feed the animals. We also got to play in a huge children’s playground.
Hope you found this useful, I will come back and tell you about secondary school.
Jack wrote the piece because he is interested in TogetherintheUK and wanted to share his knowledge and insights about primary school. I am really pleased he did.
I enjoyed Jack’s article and writing. It is interesting that Jack appears to be totally integrated into school life here in the UK. If I didn’t know the cultural background, I would have no clue that it wasn’t written by someone with a completely British heritage.
Having taught in primary school for 25 years, I can completely recognise this for a Year 6 student. My feeling is that Jack went out of his way to present this piece of writing. In my experience, many children love to write freely away from the school environment but would keep their writing in books or on paper and only share within their family setting (sometimes bringing to school to privately share with the teacher), rather than being keen to make it more ‘publicly’ available.
I don’t know whether Jack’s experience of language is purely English or whether there is a dual language upbringing, it isn’t possible to tell from this writing. My limited experience of dual language homelife has shown that the child often struggles with grammatical structure, for example verb noun position within a sentence.
The writing sounds like a typical child’s interpretation of the UK education system and reflects the areas of the curriculum that they are more and less interested in.
Thank you for sharing this.
A wonderful blog Jack, and I did enjoy reading about it so much. Looking forward to your next blog and I hope if other young people see this and read it, that they too may wish to share their stories with us and other visiting the blog.
Thank you
From a TGIUK member