5 year old tracking behind - advice please

[Cherryblossom200]

Hi there,

My 5 year old who has just entered year 1 is tracking slightly behind the national average in reading, writing and maths. I'm understandably upset, and a bit worried. The assessments took place at the start of term, and to be fair my dd has improved massively since then but I'm still concerned.

My dd has never been the type to want to sit down and colour in, practice reading and writing etc up until now. She simply wasn't interested. In lock down I tried home schooling and gave up after a week. She literally walked off after 5 minutes. Instead we did bug hunts and tally charts.

My little girl has no issues with interaction with other kids. In fact all I hear from the teacher is she is a joy to teach, always happy and makes friends easily. However she tends to prefer to have fun, adventure and explore.

So we are behind onthe education side. I have no idea if we can catch up. But she is pretty much reading now, hand writing is improving daily and she can do basic adding and subtracting.

What should a child of her age in year 1 be doing?

Her teacher is working with me to get her up to speed, but I can't help feel I've let her down 😢 of course it doesn't help that almost half her reception time was taken away from her. Does this sound like she has a learning issue?

I have no idea if we are able to catch up to where we are supposed to be.

She is ahead of my child who is the same age. I’m a teacher and honestly these comparisons aren’t as important as you think. Keep reading with her, keep playing, keep encouraging. Plenty of children muddle through all of school and do really well in life. I’m not saying we shouldn’t support our children but it’s not worth getting anxious about. You are doing all the right things. So worrying won’t add anything to your parenting experience - choose to let it go!

Echoing that she is five and she missed the best part of half her first year of education (when YR children went back in June they weren’t following the curriculum) so the fact she is only a little behind suggests she was doing really well at the start of lockdown. Homeschooling is just not what some parents are cut out for and others couldn’t do so whilst working full time. Whilst in an ideal world she would have continued learning during lockdown, she wasn’t interested and at least by not pushing things you didn’t inadvertently put her off learning.

If we enter another lockdown or you need to homeschool again, I’d seek advice from the school about what the important bits are to focus on for her so she doesn’t miss out further.

Thanks everyone, your advice always is so reassuring. I guess I just felt I let her down that I didn't do much over lockdown. But I just wanted a happy child in these crazy times.

The key thing, is that she is improving which I'm happy about. 6 weeks ago she could barely read, now she can so she's doing ok.

Im going to take your advice and not worrying about it, but do gently learning at home which is already helping.

A tip for helping kids read is to put the subtitles on when they are watching tv. They then end up reading along to the audio without even realising.

Thanks happiness 👍

There is a huge amount of variance at that age so I wouldn’t worry it’s great she was a good attitude and sounds like a productive lockdown (I have professional background in early years). I’m not sure if this is in anyway reassuring and it’s an anecdotal example but I taught myself to read at 3 and was always set 1 for everything through school and my brother on the other hand was middling and below for most of his education. He has a PhD went to Oxford. I don’t, although we both have successful careers and are happy adults. Not being smug but hopefully some perspective

Just to reassure you, my DD refused to engage at all with reading, writing or maths at school for the whole of reception and Y1. She only really wanted to do role play and dressing up.

School's reaction was that she was obviously a bright kid and once she decided to get with the programme then she would fly - so your DD is way beyond what she was doing at the same stage.

Unfortunately it became rapidly clear in Y2 that DD's reluctance to engage with formal learning was rather less to do with a love for the Snow White outfit (strong though that was) and more to do with the fact that she has hypermobile finger joints so writing physically hurts, and that she is quite severely dyslexic.

Despite those problems, she is now at secondary school on a scholarship programme and bar MFL seems to holding her own academically - although with very creative spelling.

You have got years to catch up on anything missed over the last few months, and if there is no SEN or SpLd and she has a mother as on the case as you are, I am sure she will do really well. It's v easy to panic with your first... I was a little stressed by my frankly illiterate child by the end of Y1 even if the staff weren't.

There was so much variation going into year 1 in both my DC's class. Some kids were still struggling with letter recognition and some were reading Road Dahl to themselves. You really can't tell them apart by year 4. Some of the slower starters have actually overtaken the early readers.

Why don’t you incorporate learning into her play? Most kids don’t learn by sitting down. Play board games. Learning resources has a bunch of nice board games as does Orchard Toys. Read books to her where you read several lines and she has to read a line.
Learning doesn’t have to involve pen and paper. She can write with coloured rice, with paint, with shaving foam.

Chronological age is important, especially in the early years at school. Even if your DC is not one of the younger ones in the year group it is not worth worrying about at this stage. Just do interesting things with your DC to encourage learning in the widest sense (as you have been) and perhaps read to them more to encourage more interest in reading.