How did you made your dc's ahead?

[user789653241]

On the primary board, there was a thread about what do you do with your children, and many people said they don't do anything at all at home. Yet some claim they are in yr2 working at yr6 level etc. I believe even able children need to be taught to learn new things, so if the school isn't helpful, I have to do it.(Provide him with resources.)
Did your able children just new everything without being taught, like true genius, or they still needed your input?. That thread made me feel like I was a real pushy parent, even I don't really feel that way normally. I just feel like helping my ds with his needs.

I don't think that there is any magic formulae for producing a more able child. All you can do is help your child reach his or her potential. I have two children and one is very able and the other is middle ablity. I am not sure what I did differently. It is important to love children for who they are and not what they are. Children need to be praised for working hard rather than being clever.

Getting a baby to reach their full potential starts in pregnancy. Eat a good diet, avoid alochol, attend ante natal classes. The la leche league is good for learning about breastfeeding. The NCT is good for learning about childbirth.

From babyhood I suggest breastfeeding, getting out the house, meeting people and seeing places. A baby needs tummy time. Most babies hate tummy time because they are put on the floor and cannot see you. A baby who hates be on the floor or under a baby gym maybe bee quite happy to lie on top of mummy. This video shows a new born initating breastfeeding and getting tummy time at the same time.

www.breastcrawl.org/

Children need a balance of work, rest, play, good food, plenty of sunlight or exercise to reach their full potential. Activites do not have to expensive. A trip to the park is as good as anything.

When your child starts to make baby noises respond to him. Talk to him and make a response when he make a baby noise, even if you don't understand his babbling. It will encourage him more to attempt to speak. Sharing books is a good experience to development of language. (Note I don't mean teaching a child to read.) Allow your child access to mark making materials and be positive about all his efforts.

Development of concentration skills helps academic readiness. Can they sit and listen to a story? Can they do a simple puzzle? Concentration is built by practice.

In terms of school readiness, independence skills and social skills are more important than academic skills. The teacher is not going to be impressed if your child cannot go to toilet by himself even if he can read.

What I did:

• I made the children do all their homework and not just scribble something down, thinking that anything will do.

• I spent a fortune on fiction books and non-fiction books at every stage. Both boys have always been a long way ahead of their teachers in terms of the books they read at home versus school. I took the view that reading is for enjoyment, so if they like the book, then they should be able to read it without me holding them back. However, it also seemed reasonable to think that they wouldn't have enjoyed the book unless they could understand it (which dealt with the school's comprehension theories on reasons to give easy books at school).

• We played games on car journeys and at the dining table, asking the boys to spell increasingly complex words, do sums in their heads, name the countries which border Hungary etc (This is exhausting BTW and my sons still ask for it. DS age 13 named all prime ministers in order back to Chamberlain last week - and i had to secretly google some of the 50s ones!).

• I made sure they went to school well rested, with a breakfast inside them and expecting to work. I believe that the classroom is for work and the playground is for play and I think my sons have the same opinion).

• I praised attainment and effort. (I sort of regretted that one subsequently)

I think your initial post is very enlightening. I am lucky with my boys that the school has always differentiated well for them so I need to just work at their level not teach them. That isn't to say I haven't taught them anything if it has just come up in conversation but I have never had to sit down with a work book to explicitly teach a topic. Maybe that would be different if the school didn't differentiate.

The problem I hit in the initial post is that there was a different system in place last year with the result that both boys made a lot of progress on paper. In the past, making "official" progress meant that however far ahead the Dc may be, the school was obliged to move them on a little bit more the following year. There was a lot of obfuscation around it, every year teh schools have thrown up smokescreens and offered busy work to pad out the meagre bit of progress the boys were allowed to officially make, but there was always some new official target that was further on than the level they had finished the previous year at.

Not this year though.

This year, its a new school for one of my children and a new head of dept fro the other, so they are both in a new regime. The HoD decided that on paper neither boy should make any progress at all. In both cases, their target levels for the year are identical to the ones that is says on their school reports they already attained last year.

The HoD acknowledged the lack of challenge but said my sons could spend the year tutoring the less able to help them catch up. (He didn't say tutoring but I can't remember the double-speak work he used that translates as tutoring!).

I think he even trotted out that old chestnut about not having mastered something until you can explain it to someone else. I said that doing this proves mastery, it doesn't bring it about and the HoD had no answer.

Would anyone try to claim that Einstein had failed to master the theory of relativity if he has not got Joe Bloggs from the bottom set to understand it?

In my car analogy, my sons have been asked to spend the year giving jump starts to the cars that have broken down. Still, we are nearly halfway through now. Maybe it will be better next year?? (I've tried to convince myself of this possibility at this point nearly every year!)

AAgh - sorry - I am posting on two threads at once and I've confused them. Just ignore my last post!

I read that thread, too, irvine.

I can honestly say that at that stage (think it was about a Y1 child), we did nothing extra apart from me answering to the best of my ability any question that came up. In Reception, I had been fairly good about asking DD to read every day and we had played games involving maths skills a little bit (but not particularly by design - Qwirkle, Snakes and Ladders and some of the Orchard Toys games were just things she happened to like doing). She was clearly bright in Reception but not exceptional except that she always grasped anything new v quickly.

In Y1, she just kind of took off. She was coming home from school every single day and getting out paper and pencils and writing things - short stories, chapter books, plays, poems, anything you like. She was asking what happens if you times ten by ten and then another ten and then another ten and then etc which led to discovering the googolplex which was a number I had never previously heard of in my forty odd years on the planet. She started asking about planets and space and what happens inside people's bodies and what happens if you add 1 to infinity and whether it is possible to be awake and not think etc etc. I am sure lots of you are familiar with this kind of thing! It hasn't really slowed down since then though lots of it has got more internal. She writes and writes and has endless notebooks of different kinds that she fills up. I don't really ask her about it. She's very busy! If she comes to me with a question then I'll answer it or we'll look it up together or something, but mostly I just let her get on with it. She's doing pretty well on her own, and has certainly surpassed her dad in Maths by quite some way. She is fortunate that I am confident with Maths to about A Level standard so I have showed her some stuff to work out questions that she had thought of that were beyond her current curriculum year level.

I think the only thing I ever did as a positive thing was not set limits on her intellectual pursuits. So I never said no to a question and always tried to help her find out whatever it was she wanted to know. I also never told her she'd got something wrong, just said 'well, I think you need to think about that some more' or whatever. So she never felt discouraged. She's very intellectually questing if that makes sense - whatever it is, she just wants to know more of it. I love that she has such enthusiasm for learning and love that she finds learning enjoyable, so maybe that fed into it, too.

God, Bolognese that sounds hard work! Naturally bright children do it for themselves!

Ambroxide, sounds like your dcs are really lucky ones. Great parents and great school/ teacher.

Marniasmum, I think even naturally bright children needs some guidance, especially when they are young. I have given my ds lots of different resources, but what he'd like to do is always up to him.

I provided books and a specific TV series (french) that is very very good with science/history stuff.
dc1 learnt most of it like this which means he has learnt a lot but also will have a lot of 'holes' in his knowledge.
YY to never putting any limits. No 'that's too complex to explain' here either.

What I didn't do is explain some technqiues etc..., especially in maths. I have been trying to keep a balance between explaining things, letting dc1 learn what he wanted at his speed. Explain the everyday things around us.
But I haven't explained the square root or colum multiplications etc...

Tbh I am happy I haven't because my way of doing things is so different than they did at school that it would just have confused everyone!!

Genuinely, all I have ever really done with ds is provide the relevant resources. He is pretty gifted with numbers with little or no input from me..It started with me buying a counting book and him bringing it to me ATLEAST once a day to tell him the numbers. That progressed to him telling me the numbers. Then he wanted to know how to write them so I showed him. Then when he did that he would write them all over and over, to the point where he would just be writing numbers on paper into the hundreds. None of it was prompted by me (especially the writing numbers on paper) he just wanted to do it himself.

He is also a good reader. He is ahead in terms of what stage he is on, but I think that is partly down to me just sitting reading with him each night so we just get through the books quicker than others in his class. Because we read everyday, he has picked it up quicker than some of his peers who maybe read every other day.

One of mine is clearly ahead. He has a very good memory apparent from before reception.
I make sure he does whatever homework is set,including the reading book every night,but everything else is self-directed including watching endless Natural History-type programs on Netflix,doing Lego kits by himself and reading mainly factual books.
I always read one bedtime story each and we play board games when time.
I've always answered every single question too.Tiring,but he remembers the answers so it's been a valuable learning resource.

irvine, I don't think it was me. It was her. I would never have even heard of a googolplex were it not for DD's insatiable need to KNOW MORE of whatever she happens to be thinking about. Her school is great and we are v lucky there, but I don't think I have done anything particularly unusual - literally just answered questions if I know something about it and then used google if I don't! I'm not even that fussed about homework, tbh. Sometimes DD gets something really dull so I let her do about twenty minutes worth of moaning/scribbling etc and then write underneath whatever she has done 'DD worked for 20 minutes and I felt that was enough time spent'. Haven't had any comeback so far!

It has always been completely DD's choice to do anything that is vaguely academic in her free time. I have never asked her to do anything other than read in reception. I would certainly never have asked her to write all the plays, poems, stories, riddles and articles that she's completed over the past few years! I say 'what would you like to do this evening' (I really would not have an issue if she said let's watch a film or something) and she says 'well, mummy, I had this idea for a musical about a ladybird who gets blown up into the sky on a leaf...' and I go '...?' and then off she goes and I go off and cook dinner or something. A couple of hours later she comes back with a song and a poem that she needs to set to music and something else about what would happen if you had an infinite number of prime numbers and an infinite number of even numbers and would one be bigger than another and then I go '...?' and tell her it's time for bed. She's been an education so far!

On the other side of the coin, she's 9 and doesn't really know her times tables, has no desire to learn them and I can't be arsed to make her. She works them out from first principles when she needs them. She does know a few but not the less obvious ones. She's also an indifferent speller at best and I cannot seem to stop her spelling maybe as mabey.

I chose to educate my dd. I did lots of teaching her maths or reading before she started going to school. Any spare couple of minutes through the day I would take a moment or two to teach her. It just seemed fun to teacher her and as long as I was not forcing her and she was enjoying learning, I could not see the problem. I just assumed everyone who had a child would want to teach them. It was quite a few years into motherhood before I realised I was in the minority.

JustRichmal, the idea that "even able children needs to be taught to learn new things", I got it from reading your earlier post, when I first started to lurk on MN. I totally agreed and believed it's true. Those posts were just inspirational.

I don't want to teach my child. I want to be her mum and if, sometimes, questions come up, I will answer her questions. I don't understand why anyone would want to push their child ahead of where they are naturally achieving. I don't think it will do that child any good in the long term.

Thank you. I think it is a case of giving a child a mixture of things which are good for them. Nothing but education would be like finding vegetables are good for a child and so giving them nothing but broccoli to eat. Play groups, parks and nursery were definitely part of the mix in dd's early years.
All in all though, giving a child the best education you can is no bad thing in my book.

Sorry, cross posted. Everyone has different ideas on what constitutes being a good mum. Dd is now 12 and so I am able to ask her if she is happy with having been taught. She is.
I would say, go with your instincts. If you want to teach your child then do and if you don't then don't. School is not a natural environment so a child could only reach their natural level of achievement by being taken out of it and left to educate themselves.

I understand what JustRichmal meant. It's the same thing I chose to do with my children. It is not teaching them to "put the child ahead of where they are naturally achieving", but rather sharing what I know with them, guiding them and therefore educating them.

I think I have the advantage of saying that whatever I teach them is in another language anyway, in order to support their minority language. If I don't, the school won't. That way I don't have to feel bad about enjoying our teaching and learning moments.

I was a bit shocked at your last post, Ambroxide.
I don't think there's nothing wrong in teaching a child what they like to learn.
I taught my ds how to use knife when he was about 3/4, because he wanted to chop vegetable with me. He never chopped off his fingers because it wasn't age appropriate thing to do.
Same for academic things, I think. If the children wants to learn, and if you are capable to teach, why not. I think it's all about balance.

I can completely understand the point about sharing what you know and guiding a child with the child's own interests (and if that's what Richmal meant, I am totally on board with that). I do see a lot of parents, though, who seem concerned to push their children on ahead regardless of whether this is led by the child or not - not necessarily here, just generally in life. Which is what I understood by 'teaching'. I meant proactively teaching rather than responding to queries which I don't see as at all the same thing.

My ds was in hospital for over a month when he was almost 3 years old. We bought anything available at hospital shop to keep him occupied. Colouring, puzzles, magazines etc. He was obsessed with work books. He practiced to write letters again and again, and demanded me to erase it so he can do it again. He even started to use his left hand when he had drips on his right hand(he is right handed.) I was told by nurses and doctors to let him play/watch tv etc., but that's what he wanted to do. Some children are driven to learn. And helping them with what they need, I didn't see any fault in it, even I looked like a crazy mum making 2 year old practicing writing letters.
Even my mum said let him play, but that was fun for him.
.

Dd actually taught herself. When she was younger she had a wide range of interests from Chinese dynasties to flags from different countries. If she was interested in a subject I would ensure she had enough information to satisfy her curiosity. I was very similar as a child but dd takes it to a new level. Now she has access to the Internet she researches information to her hearts content.

The only extra things I have done is paid for additional French lessons as dd started learning it in nursery and liked it so much we continued the lessons. I also paid for a course in creative writing (dd speciality is writing). I did this because she was being bullied in school and I wanted her to have a diversion from the nastiness where dd could feel that she was good at something.

I did proactively teach. I made up games for her, counted steps and swing pushes, did pre school work books, gave her a computer toy for teaching letters and words, played shops, showed her adding and subtracting with buttons, read to her and pointed to words as we went, put her in front of Cbeebies, talked to her and explained thing, made shapes from cardboard. I now cannot remember everything we did. A child's ability is a mixture of nature and nurture. The former you cannot alter, the later you can. I just saw it as giving her the best start I could to her education. What did surprise me was how quickly a child learns compared to just leaving their education to the school. I am happy to have a child who is academically advanced. From reading other posts, not everyone see this as good for a child. I think it is up to each parent to decide which is the best way to raise a child. All I can do say is how I chose to raise my child and that I am happy with my choice.

What my parents did was have good genes to pass them on to us... Really, apart from always encouraging reading and letting us mess about with computers (me and my brother taught ourselves how to program on our MSX when we were young), they didn't do anything for us. It was nature. My brother is extremely gifted (and also probably on the spectrum) and I was well above average but our 3 adopted brothers were all below average because they didn't have the same genetic background as me and my bio brother even though they had the same upbringing (admittedly bar the first few years).