help my dd move forward pleeeeeeeeese!

[morethanpotatoprints]

Ok.

We have been H.ed since Sept as many of you know and the reason was to spend more time on her musical activities.
Now all is well except anything at all to do with Maths and English.
Firstly spelling is really bad, handwriting has improved a bit and she is enjoying reading more. She won't do any comprehension or story writing at all.
Maths seems to be going backwards even though she will happily do activities, games, workbooks etc.
I really don't know what to tackle first, I don't push her but leave hints about the place. My main concern is that everybody needs to be able to do English and Maths.
I am already paying for lots of musical lessons and activities so can't afford software, tutors etc.
Where do I start? Am I panicking and she will be ok.

Morethan, don't worry, everyone panics from time to time :-) You'll become more confident as you see your daughter grow and you realise that what you are doing is working, even if not to someone else's timetable.

And yes, definitely, diary-writing skills lead into essay-writing - you don't write things randomly in a diary, do you? You probably want to organise your description chronologically, write about each bit, introduce new people, etc. If she's writing anything, I think that's great.

I used a book from the Writing Strands course with my ds, and really like the books - even if your daughter didn't want to work through one, it would probably give you some ideas (not National Curriculum ideas either!) on how to coax a bit more out of her.

And I don't necessarily think it's harder to catch up (with whom?) with maths. I actually tutor maths, and I have a lovely late-twenties tutee at the moment - he was in set 6 out of 7 the whole way through secondary school, and he's now redoing his maths gcse, is going to pass easily - in fact should get a B - and is really enjoying it.

It's always easiest to learn something when you're in the right time and place for it. Your daughter will find hers, honest :-)

hard to trust that everything will work out alright. I would be like you, worrying about it! However I think that is just normal motherhood.

As for writing, how about recitation? If you can tell a story well, you can write it well. You could read a story to her, then have her read it aloud with a lot of expression, talk about it a bit to weave in any interesting vocab and then ask her to retell the story. With time, she will get better at it, telling it in her own words but keeping some interesting turns of phrase. I used to do this when dd was small with Aesop's fables. Basically just to keep her English vocabulary developing well, since we were in a non-English speaking country. I used to print them out from the Baldwin Project. If you google it, it should come up.I always let dd choose the story herself so she didn't feel she was being made to do it.

You can then, if you both want to, go off and find out a bit about the animal(s) in that particular fable.