how do I encourage my bright 5yo DD to persevere?

[imayhavelostmymarbles]

I have a 5 yr old DD in reception. She is doing very well academically and is clearly bright ( not G and T though). She does well at school, enjoys crafty things and playing school based things at home. She chooses to do this.. HOWEVER, although she enjoys doing fine motor skills, her gross motor skills are hmm, interesting. She is quite tall and clumsy, seems to lack an awareness of where her her limbs are sometimes! ( not sure if this is relevant), but she she struggles if she finds something hard or fiddly and would rather give up. She had just started a hama bead design earlier and when she accidently kicked it, she refused to try and fix it. This is just an example as she does similar all the time. How do i encourage/persuade her to keep trying even if the desired result does not happen immediately? Her teacher has also noticed she gets worried/struggles if it is a bit harder for her.

DS is like this (now 7). Fine and gross motor skills lacking! Slowly slowly I kept telling him that, yes, ok, it might not be the BEST thing he's made but that everyone is different. And if it's arty it's subjective anyway To do it for the fun rather than trying to get it perfect.

He plays football now, and to be fair, is pretty bad at it! But he now brushes it off and says my bog standard phrase "Well, no-one's good at everything!"

Don't praise results. Praise effort.

e.g. Not: "What a beautiful picture" but rather "I can see you've worked really hard on that picture"

My two top tips for getting my dd2 to push herself is to sit with her and turn it into a game, so think of three more words that could fit in that sentence, or turn maths questions around and have a quiz type thing.

The bead thing, like Teen says, praise the effort she has put in, then sit down and start doing it yourself, guaranteed she will be sitting down next to you in no time, telling you where you are going wrong!

Its basically lead by example, our voices are just background noise to our children! No point in repeating yourself a hundred times!

I am not sure there is that much you can do, although praising effort is good and also modelling - e.g. if you find it hard to do sth, you can say "oh well never mind try again mummy" to yourself.

But a good deal of the "problem" here is probably just immaturity (she is only 5 and in YR!). Mine turns 6 soon and is in Y1, the difference in her between now and a year ago is astonishing. She is so much better able to stick at things, and reason with herself about all sorts of things, including the fact that it is not completely the end of the world if something goes wrong and that there might be a way of doing it in the end.

My DD often gets tired quickly, so we try and do tricky things in the morning and for short periods.

Thank you all, she is quite mature in lots of ways and loves being around adults. I think sometimes I do forget she is only 5.5. She is more mature than her twin brother, but he is more independent generally and doesnt hang around me all day! I do the praise of effort, and although obviously she is sometimes tired, it does feel like dhe is just being a bit lazy about doing something that requires a bit of effort or patience. Maybe it is more my expectations of her.