What were you taught when you first started school.?

As an only child, I started school at 5 years old and had never been apart from my mother. My father whom I adored worked away, so came home at weekends. The thing I remembered most was when we all had to sit in the dining hall for lunch. A very nasty bad tempered woman was marching around , apparently she was a teacher on 'dinner duty'. My parents were quiet gentle people so I had never met an angry adult until then. Suddenly this woman shouted "Don't eat with your mouth open". I don't know if this was a general instruction or aimed at someone in particular. I was terrified. I took it very literally. I remember thinking "this is something my mummy didn't tell me about, how do I get the food in there if I can't open my mouth? I wondered where else I was supposed to put the food. I tried to sneak tiny bits of food into my mouth and then clamping it shut tightly as though there was nothing in there. This one thing over-shadowed any joy that I might have found in starting school.

I can still remember large cards round the walls of my Victorian primary school classroom showing numbers. Each card had large dots on it, I think 5 was pale pink and the dots were a bit like those on the sides of dice.
I can’t remember being taught to read, but I must have learned it somehow because I was a voracious reader of even “grown up “ books before the age of 7.
I do remember that we each had slates with a “pencil” attached with string.
Best of all was Story time on a Friday afternoon when we just packed everything away and our teacher read to us. My favourite books were the “Adventure series by Enid Blyton - The Castle of Adventure and The Island of Adventure.
OMG I’m talking about 69 years ago

I think this idea adults have of children being innocent of any evil and not telling them about the Titanic because it may frighten them, is absurd.

I was born during the war, so all we had in the way of media was the radio and newspapers, but I can remember of being very aware of unpleasant things happening in the wider world by the time I started school.

When I was about 9, we lived in Singapore, the local paper was running a serial about the Japanese occupation of Singapore and Malaya and all the, truly dreadful things that happened to European prisoners of war and European families, or anyone else who opposed the Japanese.

My mother, like many people here tried to keep the paper and these articles from me, waste of time, I always read everything that anyone wanted to hide from me. Yes, the stories were horrible, man's inhumanity to man at its worst, but I already knew about these things, not the detail, but the story. It was only 8 years since the war had ended.

What scared me was not reality, but fiction. The mad woman in Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester's first wife gave me nightmares, as did Witchwood by John Buchan.

My DS was reduced to tears by a Noddy book, because the story was unfair to a new character who disobeyed rules because he didn't know they existed.

I’m sorry - I went by the title of the thread and may have posted a load of irrelevant information!
Memo to self RTFT.

Here we go, teaching bashing again!

I’ve just reread the OP. It doesn’t say her GGC was taught about the Titanic, just that she realised it must be so.
It’s not in any Early Years curriculum that I can find, and things are quite tightly prescribed about what they should learn, but there’s lots in the news about boats sinking and people drowning at the moment. It would have been worth asking (sorry if I missed a post that says the parents did) what they had been learning.
It’s a bit like listening to or reading children’s ‘news’ used to be. It often gave a totally wrong impression of what went on at home.
E.g. My mummy goes to bed when I go to school and stays there all day. No mention of the fact that she’s a nurse on night duty.

Mollygo I remember my sister-in-law telling me that she went into school for my nephew's parents' evening and they'd had to write a daily diary.
Every day he wrote 'Helped Mummy hang the washing'.
Nothing else happened in his life, apparently ?

I went to school in the Midwestern United States in the 1950s. The Kindergarten room was very cozy, but part of the school burned down on Halloween night and that room was destroyed. My older brothers were crying when they heard the news about the fire and I was amazed because they had previously said that they hated school. I had a very kindly first grade teacher and loved reading. My third grade teacher had a boyfriend who was a pilot so she gave us pictures of planes and we had to be able to spell the different parts such as "fuselage" (maybe that's incorrect?). I also got sent to the speech therapist because I didn't pronounce "th" sounds. I would say "free" instead of "three". I'm sad that a little child " got belted" for mispronouncing a word in a previous post.

Yes, my granddaughter was shown that film too and was also traumatised at age 12. I didn't tell her that all my mum's wider relatives were killed in the Holocaust. The worst thing was that they didn't have a chance to discuss what they had seen so what is the point? Just to traumatise them and not even have a discussion to bring their feelings to the surface and express how they felt?

I started school at 5 in the late 1950s. I’ve since found out that it was one of the largest primary schools in Europe at that time . We had up to 45 children in each class , 16 infant classes and 8 junior girls classes and a further 8 junior boys classes . The infants were mixed but the juniors were segregated.
Mt first teacher was Miss George who was lovely . I was very shy and remember wanting to play in the Wendy house but was far too scared to ask permission. I never once went into that playhouse in two years of infant school .
I did manage to learn to read Janet and John books . I still remember doing daily times tables and daily spellings . The other thing that we did a lot of was mental arithmetic which I’m still really good at .
When I was 10 we got told on Friday that we would be doing the 11+ exam on the following Monday . No big deal , no practising and certainly no pressure . You either passed it or you didn’t . I was lucky and had always found school work ok so passed it with flying colour . With such large class sizes it’s a wonder any of us managed to learn anything

I remember the teachers bringing in a great big radio and we listened to'How things begun' All about when dinosaurs ruled the world! Made me really question the RE lessons and always has ever since.

I was a late starter at infants school because I was born in the wrong month!!! My mother had taught me to read and to write ‘joined up’ before I went to school and the teacher was not happy and made me learn to write the same as everyone else. I still have very round childish writing but it is legible.

I was also force fed tapioca pudding by the headmistress. I’d never had it before (or since) and it made me sick.

The thing that haunted my early years at school and made them hideous was being made to drink school milk. I am probably mildly lactose intolerant and to this day, fresh milk makes me throw up, and cottage cheese, other soft cream cheeses and yoghourt make me feel really queasy if I eat them, which, of course I don't. Hard cheese I cannot have too much of.

My school days consisted of me taking my milk and trying to dispose of it, anywhere other than down my throat, without a teacher noticing. I can remember long miserable hours sat at a table with school milk in front of me, crying and refusing to drink it, or drinking it and throwing up and then being punished again for 'deliberately' making myself sick.

I hated it too, Monica. Especially when it had been standing outside in the summer. Still can’t drink neat milk, though I don’t mind a bit in coffee. Not in tea, it tastes vile to me. Can’t bear cream or yoghurt.

I wouldn’t mind betting that quite a few children were only too pleased when Thatcher ditched school milk.

At age 6 we went to Aden (now S. Yemen). We lived in an army camp, saw guns around us all the time and knew people died (occasionally a soldier too). We knew about booby bombs and had armed soldiers on the school buses. It didn't affect us and death and dying were not taboo subjects within my parents house. I think talking openly in age appropriate words doesn't do them any harm.

Pinnywinch Same background and I completely agree. We were in HongKong during the Korean War. It was only a few years after Mao Tse Tung took over China and every day stories came out of the horrendous way,

Europeans caught in China were tortured, let alone what was done to those Chinese who opposed Mao. The daily train from Beijing was met by ambulances because those released were so physically and mentally ill and looked like survivors of Belsen and there first night out of China - and many more after were spent in hospital recovering from their privations.

In Malaya, during the Emergency, my father had a gun when he was in charge of the armed guard on the trains that ran between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. I knew exactly what the Japaneses had done to European prisoners.

Children guess and worry when foolish adults don't tell or refuse to answer questions.

wish i'd been at school with some of you; i liked milk, was one of the very few good things about being imprisoned in school.
i'd have gladly drunk yours for you.

How to cross the road with Tuffty and the Truffty club

Another one who spent childhood years abroad. I started school at a Mission school run by horrible harsh nuns. When I was 5 we came home to England for 6 months and attended a convent school where the nuns were lovely and, to my amazement, there were toys to play with!
I was slow learning to read and write and remember only those and arithmetic. We learned nothing else until we returned to British schools later.

I remember being taught about Albert Schweizer and Lambarene, and about Gladys Aylward.

I remember moving up from the A2 stream to the A1 stream, and being mortified to discover that it was PE that day, which I'd already done the day before. I pointed this out to the teacher, and she suggested that unless I wanted to be sent back down, I should just get on with today's PE.

I was a shy, fat child, who hated the embarrassment of PE but I was and still am an invertebrate obeyer of the rules, so I did.

I remember the large cards with the dots on for Numbers, card with pictures on for the Alphabet.

We knitted a pot holder, embroidered a square, mixed up powder paints with water in old cake tins.

Had PE right after lunch, so often came home with bits of cabbage stuck in our navy blue knickers or on our feet (that stuff has definite stickability)

Standing in a long line for spelling and reading out loud.

It would never occur to me to not tell children something or shelter them from something like this because of their age. Right from the start, if my children asked me something I gave them a truthful answer. I would temper it to their age and understanding, but I would never bowdlerise it and pretend people didn't die, or get ill or anything else.

I was born near the end of the war. We lived in South London and I was alive during the rocket attacks, V1 and V2, our local primary school had been shot up during the war and many children and teachers killed. The event pervaded my early years. I can remember that by the time I started school I understood what death was and knew it was final. I cannot remember ever being traumatised or upset by this fact of life.

When DD was in her late teens, she said one of the things I got right (and according to her these were very few) was that if she ever asked me a question I always gave her a factual and accurate answer.

What did I learn at when I first went to school? I have no idea. I went to three different schools in my first year and all I can remember is that I got very bored at the second one because I could read fluently and count and the other children in the class couldn't and the teacher taught us as a class, so I was for ever reciting the alphabet from the blackboard and counting to 100.

I started school at 4 years old. We were taught to read very early on and to write using a pencil. I remember a lot of singing in the hall, almost every day and country dancing. We had to march around as well ( idea left over from the war ,no doubt). The classes were huge, around 45-50 pupils and they used to give us tests all the time. We sat in class according to how well we did in the tests. The slow ones were kept at the back - total nonsense when you think about it!