Back To School

Another morning, another school run. Plans for the day on virtually zero, apart from having a breather at my parents' house with the youngest. Dylan is playing nicely, so I slip away with Ava to set about my day of loitering.
"Oh, before you go..." The teacher pipes up "You will be at the phonics class this evening, won't you?"

The what now? Phonics class? Dear, I have a GCSE in English language, and an A Level in English  Literature. I think I can manage a few letters of the alphabet!

But I didn't say that. I said "Of course! 3.30? I'll be there!"

Great. So my day of gossip with mum and having endless coffees with my dad was on hold. I still went and did those things, but spent a lot of it nervous about the meeting. I didn't really enjoy school. I was clever, but a bit weird. I had blue streaks in my hair and a lip ring. I wore black a lot on own clothes day, and had a small but important group of friends out of which I never strayed. Every day caused anxiety that the one friend I had per class wouldn't show, and I would sit alone. Now I was going back to school, and starting again. I'm sure some of the parents still hadn't looked kindly on me since the meltdown Dylan had last week, and the others were already in their groups. I was to be the weirdo at the back again. But I'm an adult now, this shouldn't bother me. And I guess it doesn't.

So I got to class with a few other parents - many didn't show. Rude. We put our kids in the Y6 classroom to watch a film whilst we went back to school

It literally was back to school for me. This is my own primary school. I sat in Mr Kitts' classroom, managing to pull up a chair beside another lonely mother who I hoped had felt the same way. The room felt much smaller, but then again, it would. It was 20 years since I was last in that room, and a lot had changed. Without getting chance to take it in, a lady stood in front of the old blackboard - now an interactive white screen - and introduced herself as one of the school teachers. A young lady, probably my own age or younger. Ok love, you tell yourself that I, holder of English GCSEs and A Levels, need telling how to help a four year old with homework by a kid herself.

"So, everything you learnt is rubbish." She started, more or less. "Turns out, the way we learned to read and write as children is not the right way, and we have new methods now."

Oh. Ok?

"We all know the alphabet is A, B, C. But this is useless to children."

Pah, I knew that, I thought, feeling like a bit of a class swot.

"And so is ah, bu, cu."

What. Er, what?

"Now we teach 'Pure Sounds', so it's a, b, c. And there are ffffff and vvvvv. For example, M is not "em", or "um". It is "mmmm". We look at how our mouths are shaped and we spell words based on the sounds they make..."

Fuck I wish I'd brought a pen to write this down. I felt a total plank. What is this witchcraft? She continued on with common sense stuff I'd never considered, and I nodded accordingly. But then it got weird. She pulled a toy frog from a box and said "This is Fred. Say hello Fred."


Great, a nut job who talks to stuffed frogs is teaching my kid to read. She seemed so competent up to now.

"Fred Talk is the way we get children to learn their letter sounds. So "cat" is not "C-A-T", nor "cu-ah-tu", but "c-a-t".

It's difficult to write it and actually putting across what I mean, but she started making sense. She told us how our children did Fred Talking at school, and it is a proven method of getting them interested and engaged with learning to read. An hour later, my head was filled with good intentions and a new lease of parenting. I will sit my children and read every night. I will get them to care about language, and storybooks, and education in general.

When Dylan did his homework that night, I felt a lot more able to help him. I did before, but now I was Fred Talking. I was confident that he would understand better. That is, until, he asked "Why are you talking like that? Fred does that. I don't like him."

So the tried and trusted method may just be the answer to a better education for this generation of children. But not necessarily mine.