Hmm, v experienced teacher asking for advice..

[costagirl]

Any teacher Mumsnetters have any tips for this one? I'm working one-to-one with a Year 4 girl, pretty bright, knowledgeable, good at Maths & Science, good vocabulary and flair in her writing. BUT she constantly leaves words out of sentences, and misses endings off words. Some sentences make no sense whatsoever. If I get her to read it back to me, she can identify what's wrong, so am thinking it's carelessness rather than dylsexia, but just isn't getting any better. I've tried a reward system - a happy pebble for every correct sentence, - but still there are too many mistakes. Any thoughts?

how's her hearing?

Does she have attention problems? Perhaps she is momentarily distracted but unaware of it, so missing the odd word.

hearing and concentration are fine. She has lots of ideas and her brain is working too fast for her to get the sentences down accurately all the time - she CAN do it, if I make her slow down and enunciate every word as she writes it, but in her independent work there is no improvement. Need a new strategy and can't think of one!

Ask the SENCO to get her assessed for SpLD. If you are working 1:1 with no impact there may be underlying difficulties.

Mmm, that;s what I'm wondering. I'm tutoring her because parents don't want her to go to local secondary (not the best), and are hoping for private school scholarship. (They were thinking 11+ but are being more realistic after a gentle chat). With all other 1:1s I've seen a lot of measurable progress - although she is definitely getting a lot out of the sessions, it's frustrating that this far down the line she STILL produces the odd sentence that's unintelligible. Her class teacher says the same. Maybe there is a specific difficulty,

What happens if you write a sentence, cut it up into individual words and say it to her? Can she re-make the sentence in the correct order, using all the words?

Also, if you write a sentence and miss words out, can she identify what's wrong?

To be honest, it does sound like there might be a specific difficulty there if she is not making much progress in a 1 to 1 situation..

Have you done the old "count the number of words in your sentence before you write it, write it and then count the words again" system with her?

I'm not a teacher, so this is just an idea of the top of my head...at what length of sentence does she start making these sort of errors? 3 words? 10 words? 21 words? I'm wondering if she would be more focused and accurate with short, snappy sentences.

I'm not a teacher but my YR6 son does this all the time too.He misses out words ,writes half a word aand sometimes writes the beginning of one sentence and the end of the next.His thoughts come flooding out and he tries to write at the same speed as he thinks which of course he can't.His teacher says when she insists he slows down, this problem is rectified but his ideas are not as good.
So I realise that hasn't actually helped you has it .

Just to clarify when I said that omitting suffixes and missing out words was fairly common I meant fairly common for children with dyslexia/Spld.

Thanks for your posts - Littlefish, great idea about chopping up sentence & getting her to reform it - I have done this in the past, and she seems fine. But thanks for jogging my memory, will try it again. Also like the idea of counting words before writing the sentence - will try this (tho it will slow her flow of thoughts down a lot.) For those of you with DC with similar problems in their writing - frustrating, isn't it!

Get her assessed for dyslexia. I am dyslexic but score highly on verbal reasoning and IQ tests and this sounds similar to the problems I have. I can identify my mistakes if I look at them carefully, but when writing at speed make the same mistakes over and over again.