Currciulum Targets Foir Foundation Stage

[Guest]

Hi,

I am looking for some advice please - As a School we are in need of making sure we are setting children targets, we used to do this years ago but it wasn't done properly so we are now doing it again properly. We are going to do 'must', 'should' and 'could' for our targets.

 

I am interested to know what other reception classes do. As a school we are taking on this, having target display boards with the targets displayed and KS1 and KS2 are having a display where children can see that they are meeting the target, such as a dart board, names or pictures moving. Personally I feel this is not really appropriate for young children as difficult for self esteem etc so early on.

 

Any ideas about what other people are doing with targets, displays used etc would be very useful.

Thanks Vikki.

[Susan]

Hi Vicki

 

I cant help specifically, although I think someone somewhere said, could should must is too difficult for reception.

 

I am going to move this to the curriculum area for recpetion and year 1.

[Guest]

Hi Vicki

 

I cant help specifically, although I think someone somewhere said, could should must is too difficult for reception.

 

I am going to move this to the curriculum area for recpetion and year 1.

[Guest Keen]

I really do not think targets are appropriate for reception. I know lots of schools are doing this but having worked in a pilot ISP school we were told the targets were for the adults to know and I was very relieved by this.

 

Lets face it many of the children wouldn't be able to read the targets anyway!

 

We now ensure that we know what the children's interests and we plan from these. The work in the room reflects that learning that is taking place and we brainstorm with the children on a mind map at the beginning of a new theme. We then refer to this on a regular basis adding new ideas dna highlighting what they have learnt.

 

The 6 areas of learning have equal weighting in reception and we are told time and time again that children need to learn through play so individual targets will not develop this only hinder it in my opinion!

[Guest]

Hi there Vikkim,

Just to let you know that our school adopted this system last year, and despite my concerns, I was told that I had to have the "must, should, could" displayed in my Reception Classroom.

I went along with this, knowing that the children (a) could not read the targets, and ( it did not "fit" with the Foundation Stage way of learning.

At the end of the year the Head visited each class to speak to the children about their progress against the targets. Guess what? The children did not have a clue what she was talking about. They knew that they had little pictures which they had drawn (rather than photographs or name cards which I thought might eliviate the self-esteem difficulty) but could not relate these to any target.

I am pleased to say that the Head admitted that perhaps this wasn't suitable for Foundation Stage and that I could take them down. Hurray!

Hope this is of some help.