11 Plus Exams Forum

You couldn't make this up if you tried.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-36092762" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The schools minister is being urged to pull this year's national spelling test after the actual paper was published in error on a government website.

Well its one way to boost your numbers meeting expectations!

JD

7 year old children shouldn't be doing spelling tests anyway.

I suppose dear old Nick Gibb is so stretched at the moment, what with his cutting edge work on the exclamation mark and the fronted adverbial, not to mention the subjunctive, that this just passed him by. He needs more support staff, obviously. More bureaucrats is what we need - now. Maybe some of the junior doctors would like to apply - I imagine the contracts might be a little more...forgiving.

Rapidly, stokers let scary mum know what a fronted adverbial is (I have a DD in Year 6 otherwise I wouldn't have a clue!)

Stokers wrote:Rapidly, stokers let scary mum know what a fronted adverbial is (I have a DD in Year 6 otherwise I wouldn't have a clue!)

Also have a yr 6 DD, who says she writes a sentence and then just rearranges the words into a different order!

JD

JamesDean wrote:

Stokers wrote:Rapidly, stokers let scary mum know what a fronted adverbial is (I have a DD in Year 6 otherwise I wouldn't have a clue!)

Also have a yr 6 DD, who says she writes a sentence and then just rearranges the words into a different order!

JD

Sounds like a perfectly good method to me!

I asked ds on the way to school what a fronted adverbial is. He says it's the first part of the following sentence (up to the comma) "Running into the garden, the squirrel picked up his acorns". I have no idea whether he is correct.
I also asked him what a subjunctive is and he said it is using a more formal language such as "If I were you, I would do...." rather than "if I was you, I would do....". When I tried to gauge his understanding a bit more, he clearly felt I didn't understand and said "but it's not a tense, it's a verb form" which left me more bewildered.
KS1 SPAG test has now been cancelled though as of this morning. Shame it wasn't KS2.
Excellent blogs by Michael Rosen recently (I don't think I'm allowed to link to it here but it is michael rosen blog dot blogspot dot org dot uk
Will maybe give you all a wry smile...

Am truly hoping someone at the Dfe 'accidentally' posts all the KS2 tests online over the next 3 weeks, so they all get scrapped! Well, I can dream ... DD remains unbothered by it all fortunately ...

JD

loobylou wrote:I asked ds on the way to school what a fronted adverbial is. He says it's the first part of the following sentence (up to the comma) "Running into the garden, the squirrel picked up his acorns". I have no idea whether he is correct.

Yes, that's correct. The same sentence could be written as e.g. 'The squirrel picked up his acorns running into the garden' which may make you wonder whether it was the squirrel or the acorns running. The 'running into the garden' is an adverbial clause (as it has a verb in it) telling us when the squirrel picked up the acorns. When you move this adverbial clause to the front of the sentence, it becomes a 'fronted adverbial'. Fronted adverbials have to be separated from the rest of the sentence with a comma.

A fronted adverbial could be just one adverb, e.g. 'He jumped out of bed quickly' would become 'Quickly, he jumped out of bed', or a phrase, e.g. 'Children read their books in silence' would become 'In silence, children read their books'.