My first full year of primary school (after reception class) was a fantastic experience. The classroom was set up with first and foremost a reading area with someone permanently situated in there to read to the children or to have the children read to them. There was a sand table, water table, craft table with wood, hammers, nails and so on (not the usual stuff you would trust 6 year olds with) and blocks. Parents were encouraged to come in and help out as much as possible, there were always two extra, willing adults there every day and plenty of attention for everybody.
We children were allowed to potter from one activity to another as and when we pleased, I remember very little structure to the day other than lunch and break times and story time. We were allowed to get bored and encouraged to come up with our own ways of filling our school day.
We read and were read to, we weighed, measured, created, played house and role played buying and selling, wrote and illustrated our own books, had a ceremony for and buried a dead bird that someone had discovered in the playground and many other things, but never once were we sat down to 'do maths' or learn spellings or fill in a workbook.
Much emphasis was placed on books, we thought it was great that the teacher would sit cross legged on the floor, playing the role of schoolboy with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, promoting one of us to role of 'teacher' and encouraging us to read to the class. I came out a very fluent reader and with a good smattering of basic addition and subtraction, volume, money and in addition, many other unquantifiable things.
On moving into the second year, it was soon made clear to us that we were 'behind' the rest of our more traditionally schooled friends in the other classes and had catching up to do.
My first memory from that class was of being sat with a maths workbook to fill in, the sort that is more a test of colouring skills than any sort of working maths as we coloured 3 umbrellas blue and six balls green and on and on, page after page after page ad-nauseum.
We were given reading books that did nothing to catch our interest or excitement. Regardless of our existing reading ability we had to plough through each one in order. We went from reading the 'giant jam sandwich' to "Here is Peter, Peter is here, Here is Jane, Jane is here, I like Peter, I like Jane". As we 'progressed' through the series of these I don't recall if it ever became any more exciting than that or not.
Despite him being by far the best teacher I encountered there, he was too unorthodox for our mainstream school. There were complaints that we in Mr Bells class weren't doing or learning enough, probably from those parents who weren't able to or couldn't be bothered to come in and help out, because if they had they would have seen plenty of learning and doing going on.
The most important thing I learned (though I didn't know it at the time what a good lesson it would turn out to be) was that you can allow children autonomy in learning and they will seek out whatever they want and need to learn. We all had our own agendas for what we wanted to learn and we sought opportunities out singlemindedly until we knew as much as we wanted to. The only thing that would have hampered us in that pursuit was exactly what happened the rest of my time at school, someone else imposing their own agenda for education and then grading with ticks, crosses and gold stars.
