Is the Year 3 'dip' a universal experience?

[seeker]

Any thoughts from anyone before I go to ds's Parent's Evening? My perception is that ds has made very little progress this year, and has actually gone backwards in some aspects of his learning. I am told that this is a fairly common experience - do you agree?

I'd imagine it was pretty common at all stages really, dipping, plateauing, racing forward. It's a normal way of learning.

my dd1 was in yr 3 last year, she officially leapt forward by several years in literacy and reading (from average to good) and went back a bit in maths (from good to average). I'm not really taking it very seriously. But dd1 has always been all over the place in academic terms so I do see it as normal for her.

I'm just a bit concerned that he seems to be no longer able to tell the time, for example, and that he now looks at books, and rejects them because "they have too many words" when he was an avid reader last year.

Oh well, he's happy and sociable and having fun, so I suppose everything else will fall into place!

I would definitely bring it up as an issue at parents' evening. But it is only a few weeks into yr 3 still. Maybe he's just tired.

I will get huge pleasure from reminding them that I told them putting him on the G and T register was bonkers......!

It is supposed to be really common (our head mentioned it in passing a few weeks ago) - but I have not seen it with my DS1 - he seems to be thriving.

He did however had a similar dip at the start of year 2.

Sometimes I think it is adjusting to a new teacher - it takes them a while to find their feet.

Ok, back from parent's meeting. Teacher said he was doing very well - working to Year 4 objectives and so on - but she said there was something she couldn't quite put her finger on - she felt he wasn't doing as well as he could be doing and she wasn't quite sure how to get the extra that she was sure he was capable of out of him.

I'm inclined to say that if he's doing as well as that then just carry on as we're doing. But there's my feeling that he's plateau-ing as well. Any thoughts?

Year 3 dip? My dd1's in a year 3 undersea trench! Her reading age has dropped by six months from this time last year (so 18m in real terms), it feels like she's totally given up - even at swimming (with school) she's putting her feet down half way across a width when she was swimming lengths easily in the summer. She was reading chapter books - now she won't read anything at all. Even with dancing she's begging to go back into the infants class rather than the juniors.

It doesn't help that she's not settled into the juniors at all - she says she's got no friends, she has to sit on a table with 5 boys, and she's waking at night, every night (and has done since the beginning of term). Can anyone lend us a submarine to get out of here?!

This is totally normal for Y3. Many children only make 6 months' progress in the whole year. Ed Psychs are well aware of this phenomenon.

Year 3 is a hard year as the children are expected to be a lot more independent than in year 2. They are led a lot more in ks1.
My son really struggled with the formality of it whilst my daughter has flourished

Junior school really is very different from infants - and the step seems even bigger if it's at a different school.

I work at a junior school & our new year 3 intake are given an assessment fairly early on in their first term - a large proportion of those with level 3 from KS1 SATs struggle to get a 2a.

There are several reasons for this, but one of the main ones is that a level 3 at KS 2 really is different from the same level at infants -the emphasis is much more on problem solving - for example instead of being asked to do an addition sum, you may be given a problem & need to decide which operation (add, subtract, multiply, divide) you need to use.

On the social side, year 3 children will generally be expected to be more independent & start to take responsibility for themselves & their actions - remembering their things, giving messages to parents, getting themselves efficiently from one lesson to another (they may have Maths or Literacy with a different teacher in a different classroom for example) This can be quite a strain for some children; a good school will gently ease them in to the process & not just drop them in & expect them to sink or swim!