Eliminating silly mistakes - not reading questions properly

[suecy]

DS is in Y4. V bright - high level 5 for maths and high 4's for literacy. We are hoping he will go to a quite highly selective grammar. However, I can't seem to get him to eliminate silly mistakes which in nearly all instances come from not reading the question properly, or jumping the gun in terms of what is required.

For eg. he did 24 maths questions at the weekend and needed absolutely no help in terms of working out the answers. But 7 of them were wrong because he had rushed in and hadn't fully absorbed what the questions was asking.

I try and get him to check his work but tbh I remember checking answers as being deathly boring, and unless he takes time to read the question properly he's going to come to the same conclusion again.

Any tips on how to get this sorted - I'm worried it'll jeopardise his chance of getting in to grammar.

Find a good online maths game which marks the questions as he goes. He'll soon realise what's going wrong.

Suecy I have the same issue and honestly, apart from practising on worksheets over and over again, I honestly don't know how to solve this. I also feel frustrated when DS gets things wrong through lack of reading the question.

What I tell him now is read the question, take a couple seconds, read it again. Start answering, stop, read the question again. Work your way through to the end of your answer, read the question again, check your answer, move on to the next question, and so on.

This is also tedious but perhaps less so than double checking.

I'd love to hear from other people.

Dd2's bad at this.
For maths, I've shown her my method for checking.

1. Check you haven't missed any questions out, and what you think is the last question, is.
2. Check each question by underlining the important bits in the question. eg if it says "circle the smallest number" you underline the word circle, and smallest. Then check you did that. (ie didn't underline the largest number as that was the previous question)
3. Use a different method to work it out, or work backwards from the answer. eg if it says "You buy 3 packets of crisps costing 30p each, how much change would you have from £1" you first did it by 3 x 30p= 90p. 100p-90p = 10p. You check by saying 100p-30p=70, 70-30=40, 40-30=10p

Or if you have the question 2y + 4 = 7. You've done it as 2y = 3, y = 1.5. Check by putting the answer back in. so you say 2 x 1.5 = 3, 3 +4 = 7.

Bumping for more suggestions...

We have this with my DS (Yr 6). His teacher says it's pretty common. When he brings work home I get him to read the question aloud and then explain it to me before he puts pen to paper. Obviously he wouldn't be able to do this in an exam, but I'm hoping it will train him.