DD1 is in year 2. She’s always been on track at school before, is a particularly good reader and typically has oodles of common sense. She is, however, reluctant to do anything academic with us at home and panics about getting things wrong. We only did a little bit of homeschooling in the lockdowns due to our jobs, but she spend most of that time throwing herself on the floor in disdain whenever we made any sort of comment that wasn’t “yes, that’s exactly right”. There was also a period when she wasn’t being taught as the school offered only childcare and I was working long hours, directly involved in the national Covid response.
We’ve got into a rhythm with reading at home everyday and just about get her through her weekly spelling without her having a breakdown about the 1 or 2 words she has to think about (village not villige, orange not oringe). She invariably gets 10/10 in the weekly quiz at school.
Her teacher approached me this morning and said she was really struggling at the moment with maths, that this is unusual as she is usually “strong” at school and she wants to intervene early. We agreed to talk further next week. I was going to suggest we swap out reading at home with maths every other day, but I need some direction in what she needs to learn maths wise.
I asked DD casually this evening how she is finding maths. She said she had found it tricky recently but was getting better. She said they were doing multiplication and she had been “dreadful” to begin with but now got it. I asked her a few 2x, 3x and 5x questions and she got them all right. However, I have noticed that she finds things like “3 more than” or “5 less than” tricky. We’ve been playing a variety of games to try to address this (manopoly, dice games etc.) but it is persisting.
I have no idea how to teach a 6 year old maths. We’ve used reading eggs’ mathseeds programmes in the past, but she’s just done the placement test (as we haven’t used it in a while) and it’s put her back a bit from where she was previously. She is now catatonic with despair.
I really don’t know what to do. I’ve just let her go to watch the TV as I don’t want to make a big deal of it.
Her sister is 2 years younger, but very bright (and doesn’t give a stuff when she makes a mistake). I think there’s a good chance she will catch up her elder sister fairly soon and that is going to be a disaster for DD1’s confidence. But she’s still clever, just not exceptional like DD2. We obviously don’t say anything to this effect, but both are very astute about it. DD2 sometimes does different work to her peers at school, for example.
DH and I are also very high academic achievers, so this is new to us. While we’re not at all competitive at home, DD1 has exactly the sort of personality where she would compare herself negatively and undermine herself completely.
Help!!