What were you taught when you first started school.?

Teacheranne

My first memory of nursery school was being expected to have a sleep every afternoon lying on a fold up camp bed outside on the verandah. The school was on a busy road and I used to be lulled to sleep by the sound of traffic! This was in 1959.

A later memory is being taken outside to line the road and cheer as Yuri Gargarin drove past on a visit to Trafford Park in 1961. We made Russian flags to wave and cheered very loudly!

TeacherAnne this is going to sound like a comedy sketch from the late 60s. Sorry.
I remember we had a daily nap on a grey (WW2?) rough blanket on the floor. And we were in the soft south, but we were 5.
Camp bed? - luxury!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT1mGoLDRbc

We didn't play at infant school at all. Just sat in desks facing the front and were taught reading, writing and arithmetic along with RE - lots of bible stories. Don't remember painting, or many craft activities. But I do recall making little Easter baskets. And also learned to knit. Plasticine at our desks occasionally. We were taught our numbers by singing 'This old man he played one', and the teacher pointing to each number on a wall chart. I remember being the first one in the reception class to read and was sent to the head to show off my skills! Not allowed pencil and paper till top infants; before that we had chalk and mini blackboards to write on.

Happy days!

And also, like a previous poster, heads on desks in the afternoon for a 10 minute rest!

Teacheranne we had little camp beds too at the nursery attached to the school and I remember trying to go to sleep each afternoon.

Chardy I'm sure we had a rough grey blanket to pull over us
We were posh in the Midlands!

I'm impressed Callistemon

Goodness takes me back reading all these replies.

I too remember I had to fill two pages with the word beautiful, which had been spelled incorrectly. The sentence I used it in had been ‘she was as beautiful as anything’. I got done for that too - teacher said ‘what, as beautiful as a bag of coal?’

But I was one of those girls that just loved the boys! In the first week of infants I was rolling around on the floor in the cloakroom with John also aged five having promised to marry him. The first of many promises to marry!

The nature table was my favourite thing, and I provided many things for it. Including some tapioca in a jelly mould of water, which some big boys had told me was frogspawn!

I can also remember being taught long division in front of the class, having missed it due to chicken pox. It was by the headmaster who was a bully and would beat us whether we were right or wrong

In the infant school, we learned to read from cards; Janet and John! When we progressed to a reading book it was a real milestone. We did simple arithmetic and writing exercises. In the juniors I remember the same history stories as Lexisgranny; we had slide shows in geography lessons of where things like cocoa beans, rubber trees and rice were grown. And my nemesis - country dancing?! I was good at most things but hopeless at arithmetic from the word go!

A is for the apple letter and the apple letter says "a"
B is for the ball letter and the ball letter says "b"
C is for the cat letter and the cat letter says "c"

I could go on to Z but you get the drift. Recited every single morning in nursery class aged 4.

Then went on to Janet and John.

I remember girls playground and boys playground....God help you if you crossed over to the other one

Many thanks ladies for the interesting replies.

My own experiences of young life was being beaten by so called Sisters-of-Mercy in the home I was in after being left there by my parents in good faith with the understanding that when life got better for my family I would be returned to them. This was because I was born during the Great Depression and had Double Pneumonia and hospital treatment had to be paid for then.
There was no work and the country was in dire straits.It was named the Slump.

I was in that horrible place until I was 6 and a half.
If you got anything wrong even at the age of 4 you were caned across the back and shoved in a broom cupboard for 2 hours upwards depending how bad the wrongdoing was.
I still have the scars to prove it.
When my family finally got me back it was to me a strange world when NOT being put in a dark narrow cupboard for 4 hours after being whacked across the back a few times with a walking stick for something trivial.
My parents NEVER laid a finger on me and I think they felt guilty because they had left me at that home thinking I would be well cared for.

I knew how to spell well by the time I was 5 because I had had it beaten into me and had to learn how to write with a quill pen and ink without getting ink blobs on the paper or it meant another caning.

I had been living with my family for about 3 years when war started and three weeks into the war the hop-pickers which included my family were being machine gunned in the hopfields.
As time went on during 1940 we had been bombed out twice during the London Blitz and I had only reached the age of 10 by then.

I was still going to the school when the war first started and having to sit with a gasmask on for 10 minutes each day while trying to read or write to help us get used to it.

After spending 57 days and nights in the Anderson shelter when the worst of the Blitz was raging my mother decided to go to the authorities to see if she with my younger brother could be evacuated. We were even machine gunedon the evacuee train.
We were finally evacuated to the Midlands and I finished up in a make shift school for evacuees.

I only went to my first school for three weeks, the first of the 8 primary schools I attended.

I can remember a very boring reading book. I could already read and would 'read' this book at school with about 4 words on the page and then go home and read Milly Molly Mandy.

I was made to sit next to a little boy I took a dislike to - and then I left and went on to another school 200 miles away. Where we had to read round the class and I would get bored and read on until it was my turn and then had no idea where in the book I was meant to be at, so would be told off. Then I changed schools again.

Writing: cursive Marion Richardson copied from a blackboard and easel;
Reading: Old Lob scheme (life on the farm)
Arithmetic: yellow cards good, addition;
green cards bad, subtraction;
The Reception nativity.
I was a Welsh girl (?)who did a dance with my friends to entertain the two characters from the Willow Pattern Plate fleeing across the world from the vengeful Emperor, before ending up in Bethlehem and finding baby Jesus!
Imaginative or what?

I did the Marion Richardson writing as well all the short middle and tall letters and remember which could be joined.
I got into trouble at the Grammar for not doing cursive writing until they realised which school I had come from. One kind teacher took me aside and showed me how to join.
The Marion R. came in good stead though as I was an Infants teacher and we had to practise making labels with dip in oblique nibs, I was always in demand.As I get older my writing is returning to the Marion R. and I have bought some triangular ballpoints which I find easier to hold.
As a teacher we had a history programme called "Magic Grandad", it had the Great fire of London and nurses in the Crimean war. My 8-year-old DG is doing about Pompeii and is absolutely loving it and can tell you how you can make a caste from an ash body.

I was sent off to a classroom of older children to fetch the globe. I did not know what a globe was so when the other teacher indicated that it was on the table behind him I was stuck. Eventually the teacher took pity on me and showed me the globe but not before the older children had had a good laugh. The humiliation!

Another time I was sent off to find out the time from the hall clock. I stood in front of the wretched clock for ages - I could not tell the time. I can't remember how I got out of that one.

I was proud of being a good speller but the day I was off sick the class learned to spell 'Wednesday'. When it came up in the next spelling test I spelled it 'Wensday', not knowing any better, and so only achieved 9/10 instead of my customary 10/10. The teacher was scathing, presumably having forgotten my absence, and I cried.

No, school days were definitely not the best days of my life.

I remember a primary school teacher reading us "Beowulf" (in translation, of course). Lots of murders, a dragon and monsters - great stuff, although I cried when Beowulf died.

How bizarre. I remember reading books with Janet and maybe John. And learning to count with coloured rods. In my first primary we each had slates with chalk and my second there were inkwells and in P7 you wrote with a nib pen dipped in the ink.

Agree it seems bizarre.

And yet most people don't seem to be concerned about the Bible stories the kids are taught from a young age, which are an awful lot more gorry and scary.

I can remember it being horrible and scary, and not knowing anything much.

I couldn't read or write, and the teacher used her cardigan to tie my left hand to my side, so I would use my right instead.
And I wanted my mum!

Why were you machine gunned Maywalk? Do you mean shot at - if so who did that? Or does it have a different meaning? What a difficult upbringing you had. I do hope life improved for you after the war ended.

enemy planes would shoot at anything on their way back, esp a railway line.
why is that surprising, Elaine1.
my father told me the same, he pointed out ditches and hedgerows and recounted having to dive into them for cover.
i still remember it when i pass by there.

dear Maywalk, big up to you.
what was the evacuees' school like, do you remember ?

LOUISA1523

I remember girls playground and boys playground....God help you if you crossed over to the other one

Boys and girls were mixed in infants school but when we went to junior school age 7 there was a 10ft wall between us and the boys.
We all went on the same bus together so it was ridiculous!

I found a photo of some in my class, age about 6, on the internet on a site about the history of our town.
I do look a bit gormless ?

If you search, you might be surprised.

ElaineI

Why were you machine gunned Maywalk? Do you mean shot at - if so who did that? Or does it have a different meaning? What a difficult upbringing you had. I do hope life improved for you after the war ended.

When German planes came over to try to hit Devonport Dockyard, they would drop any bombs they may have had left over on civilian areas on the way back, probably trying to get the railway lines.
DH remembers that.