To ask the school to stretch my DD

My son asked me when he was in nursery - ‘does everyone have a number line that stretches into infinity in their head?’
Anecdata is a wonderful thing.
what would you have school do? Give her year 5 work? (That’s where seconds come in)
It’s certainly not unreasonable to ask for challenge at an appropriate level. That challenge doesn’t have to automatically have to mean doing the same thing just with bigger numbers. Reasoning demands that children should be able to use and apply their number skills to a range of contexts and in questions that take a range of forms. Nrich is good for this but you can always get practice books from Amazon etc

Perhaps consider a tutor if the qhcool can't provide extra work

This whole grim idea of "stretching" children who just happen to have academic skills amazes me. Why, just why?

She will get to secondary and do half the stuff all over again.

Leave her be - she has the rest of her life to learn stuff - grant her the gift of her childhood.

@ProudCat Fantastic post. You've given me lots to think about in relation to my own daughter.

Have a meeting with school OP and find out how high the standardised score is. You can be at greater depth for (I think) anything over 115 but that goes all the way to 140. There's a big difference between 140 and 115. It's why a lot of schools now, even primary will Grade from 1-9 or 1-10 rather than the usual "exceeding, achieving, working towards" which tells you sod all.

If the score is over 130, I'd be expecting separate maths in some form. I've learnt (it's taken 7 years) that you won't make the classroom work as hard as necessary. Schools don't like it because it isolates the kids and causes social issues. The best you'll get in a classroom setting for ACTUAL TEACHING is some slight extension based challenge aimed at the top 20%.

That doesn't mean that the school, if your kid is genuinely exceptional, can't give separate workbooks or worksheets.

I remember though, the EYFS teacher telling me that our DC needed to learn to drive their own learning. And that's 100% bang on. If your kid can read and has a genuine interest in their own development, they can just do whatever they want.

Theres a lot on the G & T page but don't forget to stretch and do things like coding and chess etc.

100%

We're in a state school. Both DC have a standardised score of 140 in maths.

I've had to push school, some teachers more than most, but they absolutely do stretch in state schools beyond mastery.

My 8 year old has maths from Year 6 and my 10 year old has maths from KS3.

You’re not in the UK so you might get somewhere.

In the UK, more able children aren’t challenged at all now. I base this on my experience with my own child. The work in her book is stuff she could do at preschool 2 years ago. They post photos of children counting to 10 and doing 1 more and 1 less. Meanwhile, the other day I jokingly asked how many seconds in 2 minutes and my daughter thought for a few seconds before telling me and telling me exactly how she’d worked it out. I haven’t taught her that. She just seems to get maths. I don’t believe there’s any way to challenge her by deepening her understanding of 1 more and 1 less than numbers to 20. I have made her teachers aware she is capable and her recent maths assessment suggests she is highly capable…but still no real challenge.

i also base it on my experience as a supply teacher. In almost every class, every child does the same work, listens to the same input. The ‘extension’ is either no harder, or its ‘help the others’ or its ‘read a book’.

Hmmm so I’ve got skin in this game in that I’m in an ex ‘gifted and talented’ pupil who ended up getting moved up a year and I’m also the SENCo in a primary school.

Several things could be going on:

1. Your child could actually need stretching and not be being stretched. This can be for a variety of reasons, eg the teacher may not actually be planning for your DD properly because she cba (doubtful) or she might not have the capacity to do so due to mad workload issues that are going on in teaching at the moment. There’s also been an explosion in children with extremely complex needs who need a totally individualised curriculum being in mainstream, so she may essentially be planning about 4 different lessons at once and not have capacity for stretch and challenge.
2. Your DD might have a spiky profile with some high surface-level skills which she has picked up due to being bright and good at memorising things, but these may not be backed up by depth of understanding. For example, I’ve had children coming into Y1 who can decode proper chapter books, but have no idea what’s going on in them. So they could read you, say, the first chapter of Harry Potter but not be able to answer if you say ‘where in the Dursleys’ house did Harry live?’. I’ve also had pupils who know all of their times tables up to 12x12 but can’t tell you how many apples I have if I have 4 bags of 5 apples. So it may SEEM like she is doing work she already knows, but really she doesn’t have the solid foundation to move on yet.
3. Your DD might have got used to being told that she’s clever and ahead etc, so now she feels that any work she’s given is too easy. I’ve been told that I’m not pushing pupils in their spellings, for example, and had to gently point out to them that they’re only getting 6/10 in their weekly test and not applying it to their work.
4. You might be wrestling with the anxiety that she is bored and not being pushed, but actually we are trained differently now and teach in a different way. For example, I’ve had complaints that I am not pushing a child because I haven’t allowed him to use the column subtraction method, which he was confident with, and insisted that he learned to subtract on an empty number line first. Seems like you’re holding them back, but actually when I called the child in to the meeting and asked him to do 1000-3, he tried to do it with the column method and 3 lots of borrowing rather than counting back.

It’s worth a meeting with the school to really explore what’s going on, but do go in with an open mind. It’s worth thinking about what outcomes you want to come away with. I was ‘pushed’ at school because my parents felt a need to in some way ‘optimise’ me. I was quite bookish and have a good memory, but really didn’t need pushing that hard (as evidenced by the fact that I am now just a normal person working in a school and not working in neurosurgery or at NASA.) It resulted in me going to secondary way before I had the social skills or executive function to cope, and it was very stressful for me to always feel like I had to perform and be perfect at everything. I cried for hours when I got a 2:1 from a good redbrick uni because I felt like I should have got a 1st and I had let everyone down. It was all silly because I love my life and my job now.

I'm going to go against the grain here I think. Let your daughter be a child. Unless she's some sort of next level genius any differences in ability will likely level out over time.

My DD is in P3 and is a bit bored of school but she's happy and that's much more important.

I was a very high achiever academically at school but socially and emotionally life was and continues to be very difficult.

Socially and emotionally my daughter is completely different to me and I count that as a real blessing. I know she will do well but I've no interest in trying to push her too far beyond her peer group.

Even a talented child can struggle with depth.
Oh certainly but lots of very able children do not struggle with depth, and refusing to allow them to move on to more difficult concepts they are ready for limits their progression.

Ive seen the challenge sheets provided at my DC school. They are barely any harder than the main content and cover the same concepts. In year 3 & 4 there is often a drilling of times tables with little/no provision for the 3 or 4 mathematically able kids who can already do them at lightning speed.

The best response i ever got was when i sadly asked a teacher if she would be happy with the challenge on offer if it was her own child.

Questions to ask school:

• what opportunities are you providing for her to
• make progress
• demonstrate the full extent of her knowledge and understanding
• be exposed to new concepts that allow her to learn

How are you ensuring that she has the opportunity to achieve her full potential

Have you seen her work and whether or not she has been challenged already? Challenge activities are always given on worksheets at my children's school but the expectation would differ with it not being expected that all children will reach it.
Kids are likely to say they are bored and done all the work, but actually they need to remember core skills hence some things being repeated more than others, and children needing to complete the work to prove they can do it.

Just get her to dangle off the top of the door frame, should work a treat

The curriculum really isn’t driven by arithmetic. I have some very able children in arithmetic who find reasoning and problem solving very hard indeed. The standardised tests we do during the interim years (I’m in year 4) were weighted at 50 marks for arithmetic and 70 marks for reasoning. Even a talented child can struggle with depth.
it sounds like the OPs child could do with more challenge though. I would recommend maths puzzles from nrich, open ended problem solving such as ‘how many ways can you …’ etc

We have the same problem. Both kids say they are bored in class, maths is easy etc. They're always sat next to the naughtier kids, in the hope they'll be a good influence. In practice, the naughty kids just disrupt them.

I honestly think though, that teachers are just too stretched to do anything about it. Hopefully secondary school will be better. When looking round, one of DDs questions was when they stream for maths, she wants to be with people of the same ability.

What are your plans for secondary school? Another year being bored at primary school isn't ideal, years and years of boredom at secondary would be really bad.

There's a real issue at the moment, especially with maths, that its become completely taboo to allow children to cover any content ahead.

They call this "mastery" and claim its about deepening understanding by covering the same basic stuff from every angle and in more problem solving style ways. However, the primary curriculum is driven by arithmetic and for a child who is very able in this area, there are only so many ways you can cover division & multiplication, all of which they will find easy. There is essentially very little differentiation as the emphasis is on "keep up not catch up" which requires that you do not allow your more able learners to open up an ever widening gap betweem them & those struggling.

It is a noble and well meant intention from the perspective of the cohort as a whole but it limits the learning opportunity available to some.

One of the bits that my DDs have found repetitive is the initial teacher input in maths each lesson. That's partly because they seem to have some sort of teacher input on the same topic repeatedly when they do a topic for days in a row, but also because of the spiral curriculum. They might look at place value to 100 one year, then the next year place value to 1000 and 10000. To a child who actually gets the concept of place value, doing it again, year after year, is really dull and they don't perceive it as something new. Both of my DDs have been excused from listening to that teacher input, except when it is actually something new. So they've got on with their work.

One year DD1 was given a folder of other maths to do when she finished her classwork. It had things like nrich puzzles. That was great, but I couldn't get anything like that from subsequent teachers.

DD2 moved to a private school for year 5 and her maths teacher plans for her separately - so he plans that she does the same work as the other high performers some of the time and then has her own work some of the time. I doubt you'll get that in a state school as the concept of mastery means they avoid teaching beyond that year's curriculum and are too busy trying to sort out the weaker students to be able to adequately challenge the most able.

It depends. The OPs child is bored because it's too easy for her. When that's the case skipping a year can be what's needed.