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School report: "lacking focus"

1 reply

Jourdain11 · 17/07/2021 15:49

DD2 (Year 3)'s school report came yesterday and it's her first from her new school, as we moved earlier in the year. It was generally positive, but there were quite a few "needs to focus and concentrate on her own work", "very sociable but spends to much time chatting and getting distracted in class", "writing is generally very good but can be careless with spellings" type of comments. I'm not really surprised by this, because she is a bit of a chatterbox and, although she's settled in very well, I think she's more concerned about her friendship group than her schoolwork at the moment! I'm wondering what type of strategies I can use to help her develop better focus. When it's something that she enjoys (dance, for instance) she can be incredibly focused and self-disciplined, but if she's not interested in something (i.e. maths) she doesn't really put her back into it. I also know that she will get distracted and involved by stuff that's going on around her, and will decide to start "helping" a friend or get into a conversation when she should be doing her work!

Any tips? She's only 7, I don't want to be too tough on her, but I would like to help her to focus so that it doesn't become an issue going forward

OP posts:
QuillBill · 17/07/2021 16:01

Do focus type a like jigsaws, cooking, planting, painting, board games etc.
Don’t let her watch tv when she eats, have conversations to get her used to listening to people and concentrating on what they are saying.
Ask her questions and then ask follow up questions of your own. So, modelling focusing.
Don’t let her interrupt you if you are doing something/talking to someone - to put a value on your own focusing!
Try to keep her on a topic or activity. So if you are asking her how Brownies was and she says ‘fine and at school today Jim had a ham sandwich’ tell her you would live to hear about that but that you would like to hear about brownies first.
Make sure she knows that you are interested in her school work and that you are proud of what she does at school and how she is getting better at things.

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