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My first teaching observation as a pre-service teacher was in a 4/5 combo class. I was only there a few hours a week for a semester but it was awesome. Very forward thinking, non-traditional and the students seem to really enjoy it. I like to think of it more of a two year class with 9-10 year olds. There capabilities are similar and they can get through a lot of curriculum that way because the teacher knows them sooo well (academically, socially, motivationally etc.) by the second year. In fact, my teacher took all of the fifth graders camping with their parents each year because they would all get so close.

I was in a 7/8 split for a few months when my family moved. I didn't like it at all and I don't really like splits because the way they usually work (from what I have experienced) is one grade gets to do work or be taught while the other does work from a workbook kind of thing.

My second teaching placement as a pre-service teacher was in a 5/6 class and the teacher did a better job of teaching to the whole class, but there were still times were one group was left to do their group work and the other group was being actively taught to.

I know that they have to have splits because there sometimes aren't enough kids to make up a whole class, but I don't like them as both a student and as a teacher.

The way I feel it should work is to pull things from both grades so you can teach the class as a whole group. I know that's hard, but I feel it's better.

I was in a 5th/6th split as a 5th grader. There were only like six 5th graders and maybe fifteen or twenty 6th graders. I had a great experience and loved it. We had to go to another class with all 5th graders for history class and we did math separately (stayed in our room and teacher worked with us while 6th graders were doing their work) but we did everything else together.

The next year I had the same teacher the next year and it was just a 6th grade class

I've taught a couple of split classes, the nice thing in my province is that split classes are limited to 16 kids so there's really great one on one opportunities

I was a student in a k-1-2 combo class as a 2nd grader. Of course that was forever ago but in that case we mostly did kindergarten level work so it was a disadvantage to the older kids.

I taught 3/4 split in a Montessori inspired school and it worked really well. The kids all had an individual work plan and could complete a lot of their work independently. Each room had a lead and an assistant so the lead teacher would give individual or small group lessons based on skill and the assistant would help the kids who were doing independent work. There was a morning and an afternoon meeting each day and frequently they included a large group lesson. Each afternoon there was about an hour of full group lessons as well, usually stuff like science or social studies.

It was an enormous amount of work as a teacher but it worked extremely well for most kids. It was a school with a large population of students who might otherwise be placed into special needs classrooms AND we had multiple students that were quite gifted academically (with some overlap between the groups even.) My room had one child with CP who had no language skills and essentially no motor skills at all, one with such severe cognitive delays that we were doing basic phonics lessons and then another child with a high school level understanding of biology and then everyone in between. Meeting all of their needs was extremely difficult. I think a smaller class size would have been awesome though, we had 26 students in one room including a child in a wheelchair so stuff was kind of squished together to make sure the chair had room to maneuver.

I'm a school social worker and this is the model for self contained special education students. It's a very small class with 8:1 student teacher ratio. The teacher teaches one section of material to 6th grade and then one to 7th. The kids often get confused. But the teachers work very hard.

I was in a 4/5 class as a fourth grader. I loved it!