What do you recall from your first day at school?

I hated leaving my mum but I was lucky having a twin we went through infant and juniors in the same class so always had an ally. I remember the little bottles of milk always warm yuk and doing p e outside in vest and knickers was so cold and embarrassing

I don't remember my first day at school. I told my mother my teacher must be old as she had the same shoes as my mother. Meeting her many years later at our GS reunion I discovered she was actually younger than my mother and in her first job.
The one thing I remember was having to have Horlicks tablets instead of milk after the radiation leak at Sellafield when all milk in NW had to be poured away, I have never liked Horlicks

My mom had given me a "pixie haircut" which I'm not sure what the point of that was, but there I was in my boy haircut, wearing my little skirt and leather buckled shoes and a boy walked up to me and asked, "Are you a BOY or a GIRL ???" I was 5 years old. I didn't quite understand the question. Hadn't given it a lot of thought. I was just Macadia and didn't know that I was supposed to "fit in a box". It made me sad but I got over it.

The opposite - I had to fight for 2 years to stop having long hair yanked into pigtails each morning and they gave in in top juniors and I had a pretty cut. I thin as the eldest I had to pave the way to be allowed to grow up.

On my first day the teacher pointed at the letters and numbers around the blackboard saying that by this time next year we would know them all.
I wondered if she was really a teacher as I had the idea in my head that teachers knew everything. I could already read and write and had been in a nursery school attached to a boys “ pre- prep. School”. I’d been put in with boys of 8 & 9 as I was considered bored in the nursery class. I hated infants school. The other children were all noisy and nasty and I never actually learnt anything except how to stay quiet and make sure I sat where the teacher could see if anyone hit me, not that anyone ever did but I somehow thought noisy children hit you. Junior School was better but it was still boring. If the teacher asked a question then even though I had my hand up, I’d only be asked if the others had been wrong. So I stopped putting my hand up to answer. I took the 11plus and was the only girl to pass on to the Grammar School. I later found out that girls had to get much higher points in the 11plus to get into Grammar Schools than boys.
I was unlucky in my Grammar School.
It was rather old fashioned and still had Latin as a standard subject. I loved Latin classes and the Latin teacher gave me the following years books as she said I might as well study something I enjoyed. Other classes were ok but I didn’t enjoy them. The 2nd year the Latin teacher didn’t re appear and Latin was taken off the curriculum.
I French teacher who appeared was a horrible woman. Who read magazines in class and set us homework we didn’t know how to pronounce as she never spoke to us in French. So I didn’t attend French classes and no one said anything! even if they noticed. I only stopped as in the first test given to the whole class, we were all given Bplus. Even me. Even the girl whose first language was French.
By the time I was 13, I’d decided that I disliked school and hardly went.

Mallin Your education sounds dreadful. I was fortunate, I kept changing schools until my second secondary school, so never got bored.

I was not happy at my boarding grammar school, and got an unjustified reputation for being academically lazy. My written work was poor, mainly because I had dreadful handwriting, although I did very well in exams.

I just hunkered down and concentrated on what mattered to me. I knew I was clever, I knew I was good at exams and I knew that the road to freedom meant getting good O and A level results. So that was what I did.

We had a dreadful latin teacher who did not like me, so in my O level year I got Teach Yourself Latin out of the public library and renewed it constantly for a whole school year. I passed my latin O level wiith the highest mark in the class.

To the fury of several of my teachers, I passed all my O levels, with no failures. One of the few pupils in my year to achieve that. In the blink of an eye I went from 'that stupid lazy Monica* to that 'Clever Monica, we alway knew you would do it'

I now know that I have both dyspraxia and ADHD and both these contributed to my problems at school, at a time when these problems were not known about or only within limited academic psychological circles.

I quite happily skipped to school on my first day but was really puzzled by a boy we passed who was crying and screaming, refusing to budge for his mum.

Being an introvert I happily played by myself with some wonderful Russian dolls for as long as they'd let me.

I suppose that I had got broken in by going to nursery school.
One memory of NS was when the photographer came. Before everyone's photo was taken they had to build a little item with wooden bricks then knock it down. Picture was then taken with the strewn bricks.
I was so cross having to knock it down, I wanted my masterpiece in my photo!

I remember starting infants age 3 and used to go home for lunch as we lived near the school, when I went back after lunch they had all these little foldable beds laid out and I remember hiding behind my mother crying because I didn’t want to go to bed.

School milk in glass bottles. It made me feel sick but I was made to drink it.

I can only very vaguely remembering the school had outside toilets and it had a clock tower and the teacher had dark hair. I was 4 and it was 52 years ago, so memories will be vague.
Remember my first day at " big school" quite well as I was really nervous as we'd moved to a new part of town when I was 11 and knew hardly anyone in the school. Took me a couple of months to settle in, but like most kids, you make new friends.

I started at a small Mission School run by unkind nuns. I don’t remember anything about the first day but it helped that my two brothers were there too.
I changed schools nine times and hated being always the new girl, knowing nobody. At each school they did things differently so some learning got missed out and others things were repeated over and over. I was seven before I could read. With such constant change it’s surprising that we all got to grammar school then to university.

We moved about quite a bit until I was 8, and ended up attending 5 primary schools in 4 years, with a spell of six months where I never attended school due to moving to three different places. Luckily we settled in one town in 1976 and I spent three happy years in a junior school where I did quite well.
I spent two years at my first secondary school, where the teachers reckoned I was university material as I was good at most subjects except art and design, and then went to a semi selective school when I was 13. This was better academically, but to be popular, I messed about quite a bit and had I not knuckled down in my final year after some poor mock O level results, I'd have been out of education at 16.

Being vegetarian in the 60s was more unusual than it is now. My mother had told the school but I was served meat on my first day. Because I had never eaten it I had no idea how to cut it up and cried when I was told off. I wouldn't eat it and was told off again for being ungrateful when there were children starving in Africa.

After that I had a packed lunch or went home.