Year 2 child struggling with maths

[UniqueTiger]

Hi,

I have a daughter who is nearly 7 (she’s in year 2) and she’s struggling immensely with maths. She gets the method but struggles to put it into practice. Her teacher has had several meetings with myself and my partner and she has concerns with her putting methods into practice and stems from not understanding properly place value.

She has a learning plan with targets and they work on these using different interventions and she’s taken out of class to work on them. However, she is only making very small progress. We work with her at home and practise maths everyday but I’m conscious that she’s been at school all day, then she’s made to do her homework alongside additional work. I’m happy doing the work with her as I want her to progress but I don’t want her to feel overwhelmed.

We have resorted to 1 to 1 tutoring for an hour a week at home. Last night was awful, my partner and I were in the next room and we could hear the session. I feel bad as I can hear her struggling to the point she couldn’t tell the tutor what comes after 49. Towards the end she started to mess and she’s rolling around the floor being silly, the tutor asked her to sit up several times. I intervened in the end and told her to sit up and listen. The behaviour is unusual and though she messes at home, at school she doesn’t. I do understand that maybe she feels she’s at home, not in her uniform, less formal in regard to her calling the tutor by her first name that she feels she can mess around. In context last week was her first session and she was absolutely fine as she was getting the majority of the questions right. Do you feel she’s messing because she’s struggling? I’m concerned as she goes out of class in a 1-2 ratio at times with a child who has been diagnosed with Autism and ADHD. The child is a lovely little boy. He however, messes similar to how my daughter was towards the end of the session. I hope this doesn’t sound terrible but I feel she’s copying the behaviour slightly. She does understand the child in question cannot help the behaviour. However, behaviour breeds behaviour.

I explained after the tutor left that it is okay to struggle but it’s not okay to mess around. I told her next time to tell the tutor she doesn’t understand or she doesn’t know the answer.

I have been wondering lately if maybe the problem stems from Dyscalulia. Thoughts please?

Her school takes part in KS1 SATs (the school have opted to do them as they are not mandatory) and basically they are made to sit test papers at the age of 6 and 7. I find this ludicrous, surely there’s other ways to get data then formal testing.

Sorry it’s a long post but I’m so worried.

My first thought is that an hour is a long time to ask a child of 7 to focus for, particularly after a full day of school and late in the week. So I'd try not to worry too much about the tutoring session going wrong at the end. Perhaps a shorter session might be better, even if only 45 minutes instead of 60, or perhaps a different day.

How the school gone back to the absolute basics to look for gaps or weaknesses in her mathematical understanding? Maths can be very unforgiving that way, if there's something you've not got early on, it can really undermine things later. Is she rock-solid on one-to-one correspondence and that things can be arranged or grouped in different ways without changing the number of them?

As the concerns are concept-based, rather than speed, how much work are they doing with visual representations and manipulatives? I can remember a lot of place value exercises with lolly sticks and elastic bands (ten lolly sticks, bundle together to make one ten, and reverse) and smarties and little paper cups, etc. (No prizes for guessing which manipulatives we preferred!)

Has the school Senco got involved? How about an educational psychologist if the standard interventions they are doing do not seem to be enough?