Learning Journals-who Gets Them?

[Guest]

Hi,

 

Should the learning journals go home with the child at the end of the year with a suggestion that they take them in to show the reception teacher and a prompt to teacher to ask for them...

or can we pass them on to school, with parents permission and then school give them back to parents in the Autumn?

 

I know that all our assessment info. will be lost on some of the parents but would be very useful to school. Also not sure that the parents who most need to show the LJs to school will do as they might decide our judgement is 'too low' etc.

 

OHHHHH! I have had such a day of parents. Really struggling with a couple of Mums who will not accept that their child has special needs. I can't wait for them to go school so that someone else is telling them the same thing. I miss having the weight of a school behind you at these moments. In pre-school I always feel like parents can write you off as 'just the Pre-school lady, what does she know'. I have a Masters in special needs education but hey, what do I know??? I just wipe bottoms.

[thumperrabbit]

I feed in to at least 4 different schools and they all want something different.

 

1 school likes to have the childs folders

1 school wants a report

1 school want the highlighted sheet marking of the development matters that each child has achieved

1 school wants all of the above!!

 

Anybody would think they weren't all in the same LEA but they are, I'm not sure why they all differ so much. When the teachers come for their visit to playgroup I ask them if they want the folders or not.

[Cait]

We invite teachers in to look at folders with the children, folders also go home when teachers are doing home visits. The assessment side of the folder used to go to school first but County want us all to do the same this year, so school will just get a highlighted sheet now and parents will get all the rest.

[Emmawill]

We are in the grounds of a primary school and work closely also use feeder schools. We pass the Development matters document to the school and the personal stuff to the parents.

[hali]

we run transition evenings for our providers and schools and folder go to the school to be looked at and then continued in school

[Fredbear]

Hi our learning journals are the property of the child and parents at our setting, so it all goes to them when the child leaves, including the Development Matters. We do recommend to parents that they share them with their chosen school.

We do have visits from all our feeder schools this term, also a transition meeting, when all schools can discuss children coming to them with a practitioner from all the Early Years settings in our area this works really well too.

[catma]

Hi our learning journals are the property of the child and parents at our setting, so it all goes to them when the child leaves, including the Development Matters. We do recommend to parents that they share them with their chosen school.

 

 

This is a bit of a fundamental difference with schools where the records of attainment for any child are the schools documents. Parents can request to see everything held but they do not as such "belong" to the child or parent.

 

Which does explain why school staff do get confused when they are told they can't have a record!!

 

Cx

[Fredbear]

Hi Catma i think one of the other differences is that it is a parents choice to send their child to a pre-school/nursery,unlike school which is statutory for all children the term after their fifth birthday.

It is a very interesting topic with so many variations.

We also have one school that sends a can do sheet to be completed at pre-school with parents permission, others are more interested in the child's social skills, friendship groups etc, others will assess once they are in school and make their own starting point.

Lots of our schools also do home visits, which can tap into a child's interests before they start.

So come on everybody what does your provision do?

[Guest rainyjaney]

We use Bimingham City Council transition document-a summary of achievements in EYFS with space for parent observations/comments ,photo of the child and a box where the child can add a drawing. Parents have a copy, school has one and we keep one. Learning journeys go home with children at the end of the year. For children with special eductional needs we use a PLA Summary form and again provide copies for parents and school and keep one on file ourselves.

[Scarlettangel]

Most of our nursery children attend the reception class next door, and in these cases we pass the learning journey books to reception teacher who has a look at them because she feels they tell her more about the child and his or her interests etc than a filled out developmental levels sheet.

 

At some point after the start of the reception year the teacher then hands these LJ's to the parents to keep as a record of their time in nursery.

 

For children moving to a different school we forward the learning journey and profile sheets and add a note asking if staff will give the parents the learning journal once they have looked at it.

 

Parents are told when they visit that this is what happens to the books.

[bubblejack]

We give ours back to the parents when the child leaves. We do a developmental sheet stating the last achievement in each area and give this to the teacher when she visits. She makes her own observations also. We also give the teacher an example of the childrens mark making. I also let the teacher look at the childrens folders and explain that they will be given to the parents if they wish to see them at a later date.