would you raise this issue with the teacher?

[froubylou]

DD is 9 and in Y5 at school. Doing very well and always has done. Never any issues with her behaviour, never been in trouble, always loved school. With regards her work she is very bright. In Y6 for maths and top of Y6. Top set for reading, english etc. Always 10/10 spellings. Reads for fun, likes school work blah blah blah.

I am very proud of her academic achievements but know that although compared to the class she is in she is bright, she is not a child genius or anything like that. But she does very well.

Since being in Y1 the main thing she has always been targeted on is the speed of her work, in particular written work. Her handwriting is beautiful (even though she is left handed) and she is always the first to get a handwriting pen. She always tries to do everything she is asked to do. Such as use Wow words, extend her sentances, use joiners etc etc etc.

This does tend to slow her down a little compared to the other children. They may be asked for 5 sentances and all do the 5 sentances, it's just DD's sentances will be 3 times the length of everyone elses.

As 'issues' go it's not a major one. Her speed will pick up in time as all the new skills she is learning, as well as things like spelling become automatic and she can do these things without having to think about them.

In the meantime she has always gone to the 'behaviour room' at break times to complete work. Even if it has take all of a break to get it done, and last week she missed 2 breaks.

I don't have a problem with this and neither really does DD. She just accepts it and when I've asked why she has to make every single piece of work perfect she just says that's the way she is.

However, since moving into the new class at the start of term she has also had to miss 4 Golden Times. Golden times are the friday afternoon 'fun lesson' that all the kids, including DD look forwards to all week. It was introduced to give all the well behaved kids a reward for being well behaved. You miss Golden Time if you haven't done your homework OR you have been naughty and gone through the behaviour scale ie warning, time outs etc etc.

She has missed them as she has been sent to the behaviour room to complete literacy work they have done on a Thursday afternoon. So although she may have already missed her friday morning break she hasn't got it completed and has to miss her Golden Time.

DD upset about this and TBH so am I. Missing Golden Time is a punishment, and as far as I can see she is being punished for not completing work which is very different to being naughty. She won't have gone through the behaviour scale for it. If she was missing out because she was chatting when she's supposed to be working or messing around etc then I would accept it. But not for caring a bit too much what work she hands in.

Its Parents Evening on wednesday. WIBU to raise this issue with the teacher and ask for her to bring any incomplete work home rather than miss golden time. And to ask what support DD is getting to help her manage her time more effectively? Its been raised since Y1 and I have never met a teacher who can give me solutions yet to the issue that she has, and all have said they would rather her hand in work she does at the standard she does than rush it.

But from DDs point of view she won't always be able to do the work at another time. So I think they need to help her with this rather than take away Golden Time?

And FWIW normally I would just go in and say all this BUT am 31 weeks pg and I really don't like this teacher and find her ineffective at best so don't want to be 'that mother' if it is just me being unreasonable?

Sorry for epic post, maybe I need to miss some gold time too lol.

YANBU I would definitely mention this to the teacher.
It's not fair that she's missing her golden time.
Make yourself 'that mother' when talking to her teacher.
Im planning on being exactly that when Im at my ds parents evening...and Im really looking forward to it.

Oh yes bring it up without a doubt ...

I don't think she should be missing Golden Time, if missing that is a sanction for bad behaviour and her behaviour is good.

However, I'd be checking that she isn't chatting or day dreaming. We have numerous daydreamers (I'm one as well ) and if work is incomplete they have playtime to finish it. Golden Time would only be used as a sanction for those children if they had messed about and not completed.

So to cut a very long story short, your DD needs to speed up her writing and make it less wordy?

YANBU to have a word about the Golden Time

But she does need to learn to write a little less and a little faster because I'm not sure senior school will make such allowances.

I'd be asking what the school was doing to help her overcome this issue. She shouldn't be punished for it, but helped. It will become a greater problem as she gets older eg in timed situations such as exams, so it really needs working on.

Thats my point too Worral and Seeline. She won't have the luxury of extra time for much longer and will suffer because of it. So instead of a punishment I would like to see an action plan on how to overcome this issue.

And FWIW as you can probably tell from my OP I'm pretty wordy myself. And did suffer when I got to secondary because of it so am keen to nip it in the bud now. But don't think a punishment is the way forwards.

I am going to be that mother. Roar lol.

Will she be sitting SATs at the end of y6?

I would tell her to stick to the task she has been asked to do. If she's asked for 5 sentences, she should produce 5 sentences. Fitting the task to the time is an incredibly important skill- and it will serve her well to learn it now.

Punishing her is wrong but she needs to be supported to change by you as well as the school. She isn't going to cope with the rest of her education, let alone her working life, if she is this much of a perfectionist. You criticise her teachers for failing to offer a solution but you also say that "you don't have a problem" with her being so slow/perfectionist. If she gets that message from home, she is not going to improve.

It sounds as if you need to meet her teacher and, rather than complaining, agree a mutally acceptable plan for helping your dd to manage her time, both at school and at home.

OP are you in Scotland?

If the school rule is that you get punished for not doing your work properly by losing golden time, then, because she' not doing her work properly she has to miss golden time.

YANBU. Bring it up and give the teacher a chance to offer a solution. If you don't think she offers a good one then maybe you could talk to the year coordinator or literacy coordinator.

My sister had similar issue with dyspraxic son being made to catch up on work he was slow to finish.

If DD is writing three much longer sentences then surely she is writing as many words/lines as everyone else?

You said she's a good speller so maybe that isn't making her slow. Do you watch her do writing tasks for hw? Does she spend a lot of time thinking of great words or is it the physical act of writing? Maybe she spends too much time making her writing nice?

See if you can pinpoint the causes any further and definitely bring it up.

My dd1 is 8 coming 9 this school year - she's in P5. They have a word limit in their sentences. I mean sentences have to contain less than 20 words, it helps them be more succinct and in technical terms less waffly .

Without a doubt mention it to the teacher, the loss of Friday afternoon golden term is a little unfair but your daughter will need to speed up. Doing tasks/ work within a timeframe is just as important as including all your compound words, speech marks, etc in the perfect sentence. My eldest sounds very similar to yours, although she'll be sitting transfer tests in 2 years (we're in NI)

"If DD is writing three much longer sentences then surely she is writing as many words/lines as everyone else?"

But the task is to write 5 sentences, not x number of words.

Is this for all writing or just for creative writing? I had similar issues in primary school as my ambition out paced the the time I had in class to write things down. I often ended up doing writing at home to fit it all in. I didn't struggle on transfer to seniors because they were much more specific about "functional" writing and the creative stuff I continued to spend extra time on at home.

I think missing golden time is massively disproportional to the issue!

"If DD is writing three much longer sentences then surely she is writing as many words/lines as everyone else?"

No, obviously she is writing more than every one else as she is doing the same amount of sentences but with more words. The 3 is three times as long, not three sentences. She is writing five sentences.

YANBU to mention to her teacher about Golden Time and see if they can be a bit more lenient about withdrawing it.

however, as another one who tends to be wordy, could you work with her to find more succinct ways to structure her sentences, or try and make it a game to find a way to complete the given task using the fewest words. Being able to write concisely is a skill she will need for the rest of her life and learning it now will mean it is ingrained by the time she is completing timed exams for example.

It's a tricky one. An able Y5 pupil will be writing sentences which are much longer than another child in the same class whose targets are to use simple connectives such as 'but' or 'if'. You might expect that child to be writing a complex sentence with two adjectives, an unusual adverb, a subordinating conjunction and to be using higher level punctation; a sentence containing a semi-colon will be twice as long as a simple sentence!

My advice to her would be to get something down on paper as quickly as possible instead of trying to craft the perfect the sentence right from the beginning. Once you have written something you can always edit it / uplevel it. And therein lies the problem. Conciseness is great but it's important that children display what they can do, and for older/ HA children that means writing at length (so long as it's all on task and doesn't waffle.)

However, I'd expect a child working at her level to produce at least a page of narrative writing in a 35 minute session in a lesson, or to have completed e.g. a newspaper report, diary entry etc. Level 4 writers should be paragraphing, and that indicates the amount of work that's required as a minimum.

As long as she is genuinely keeping on-task at school, YANBU - the teacher should be helping her to learn how to write more quickly/concisely (depending on which aspect is the problem), not punishing her for struggling to meet the required standard in the time allowed.

However, I agree with posters further upthread who say that you really must start working on this at home - it will really hinder her at secondary school, where she will have five different subjects per day and may get homework from every single teacher on some days.

In your position, I'd get her to play a game of (newly invented, property-of-me) "In A Nutshell" with you . Rules: type out a series of very boring sentences which use a huge number of words to convey a small amount of information, with a couple of lines of space below each one (no more), and print two copies. Give yourselves a time limit (e.g. 1 minute per problem) to rewrite the sentence so it is as short and snappy as possible, but making sure that it still contains "wowers", correct spelling and punctuation, etc. Compare answers at the end - discuss what makes one answer better than another, and whether it would be possible to make it even more concise. Do this nightly for a while, gradually making the problems harder and reducing the time limit.

I also agree with the poster upthread who suggested trying her out with an egg-timer (although possibly a stop-watch would be more appropriate/adaptable) for class assignments.

Other things to consider, in case there's a practical/physical dimension to this: is she holding her pen correctly (as, if not, it could make her hand cramp up when she tries to write faster)? Is it definitely not a problem with the ink (i.e. not drying very quickly, so she has to slow down in order to avoid smudging)? Would she write more quickly with a different pen, or a calligrapher's writing slope? Is her handwriting excessively neat? Has she been taught that she must avoid crossing things out, and is taking too much care to avoid making errors and bad lexical choices? (I particularly hate the last one, as it encourages pupils to be over-cautious or under-ambitious in their writing - editing is to be encouraged as children's grasp of English develops!)

I have taught a girl like this. She was a perfectionist and, because of this, wouldn't even get started to write while the others had written three sentences. She was always behind, even though her end result was always great and she was in the top DC in the class.

Your DD does have to learn to work faster. I would bring it up with the teacher re Golden Time, but perhaps teacher is at wits' end with her slowness? Ask what you can do to speed her up. Perhaps have DD with you for some of the discussion with teacher.

Oh, and one more thing: I find that children who read a great deal tend not to have such a problem with this, as writing higher level sentences requires far less concentration and deliberation for them. Is she reading much at the moment and, if so, is the material suitably complex for her ability?

I sympathise with your DD. I was the child you describe and remember having a wicked argument with my history teacher, aged 14, where I told him (in a pretty well thought through argument, to be fair) that he was obviously going to get lower quality work from everyone if he didn't give us enough time to do justice to the questions he set.

It's such a tough balance - I'm still a perfectionist but in the working world, sometimes there has to be what my old boss called an 80/20 approach - ie do the best you can in the time you have. Personally, I think this just serves to lower standards overall, but see his point.

I'd definitely say something though - you don't want your DD to be put off because she's actually doing something too well.

I would raise this, and I think the tack that I'd take is that DD is pushing herself, and generally trying to improve, and is producing the best work she is able. She is not coasting or cutting corners, and for this she is being punished.

However, while there, I'd ask if there is anything you and the teacher can do to help her to respond to the brief rather than over-exceeding it. I'd also double check that there's nothing else going on that the teacher is aware of - for example, is your DD lulled into a false sense of security as she knows she's bright and able, and is therefore spending some of the time chatting and so forth.

I'm not saying she is, but I think it's a good idea to get the teacher's perspective of what's going on, and then to work on how to resolve it.