Do younger children more likely struggle with problem solving in maths?

[vkyyu]

My both dcs summer babies are very able in both reading and spelling without any help. However they both seemed to struggle with problem solving in maths in particular. Especially my 7 yr old dc who is very good at times and division tables upto 144 but struggle to understand maths word questions. Are maturity / wider life experience related to their abilities in word maths questions? Are autumn babies better at word maths problems?

I would have said possibly when they are only in reception but by the age of 7 I can't see how an autumn child will have any more experience maths wise than a summer child. They have all been at school having formal maths teaching for the same amount of time.

My DD is a Summer-born 6 year old and in Year 2.

She was just transferred to an advanced maths group to get extra lessons. There are six children from her class, 3 of them, including her, are Summer born girls.

I think it is more down to the child's general school understanding.

My sister and I are both Winter-born. My sister hated maths and just managed to strung along while I have an A-level in maths and a career in finance.

Individuals vary of course, but at a large bean-counting scale I think that's plausible.

We weren't paying too much attention to academic prowess back then but with my summer-born DD, Y3 (all of it not just the start) was when lots of things began to "click". I don't recall her being good at the reasoning stuff at the start of Y3, but she's in Y6 now and does that very well. In the interim we occaisionally opportunistically got her to tackle some real maths problems in home-life via shopping, recipes and so on, but not very much.

Meanwhile: Very few children pass KS2 SATs L6 Reading (largely comprehension/inference): The theory is that it's lack of life-experience and maturity that keeps the pass-rate low. Comprehension, inference, generic problem-solving and the wordier maths problems seem like different aspects of roughly the same mental skills to me.

vkyyu:

Just a parent, but instinctively I would say that maths word problems often are the trickiest. Often it involves multiple calculations and with my DDs I find that they tend to want to do this in their heads, rather than write down work for each step.

Like anything - there are tricks to it and practice with word problems is probably the easiest thing.

You can do this just by reading maths problems out loud to your child and then have them do the work:

So 24 x 6 = How many cards would I have if I had 24 piles of six cards?

Hertfordshire grid for learning has some nice resources for maths here - www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/maths/ks1-2/framework/investigations/ - including power points with word problems (although I think answers are not provided).