Any teachers about please.

[NewLife4Me]

I am looking for suggestions as to a way forward and also how you would manage this situation.

Despite having extra help from 2 teachers dd received 7% in her recent Maths test.
She was asked to do it again after some help and scored 14%.

She doesn't get Maths at all and as a result doesn't have any motivation at all. However, she realises it isn't going to go away and she'll have to work extra hard to manage to improve.

We have agreed to work through the test with dd during the holidays but I informed the school that ks3 Maths would be impossible for me to explain as I have severe learning difficulties with Maths. Dh can help but will be working a lot during the holidays and also dd needs a break too.
We have bought her the ks3 study book and will support the school and wonder if there is anything else we can do.

I also must add that despite her problems with Maths she is at a school for gifted children and is slightly above average in other bright in other academic subjects.

As a teacher if you emailed a parent to say you were concerned, what would be the next steps you would take and how long would it be before you asked for an assessment if funding wasn't an issue? i.e private school.

Just a further thought - can she still do what you know she could do at the end of KS2, even if she is presented with e.g. a single question on a topic amongst questions on other topics? Or does she work best when given a set of very similar questions of the same type?

Also, can she work with e.g. word problems as well as she can work with a numerical calculation?

e.g. If she was asked to find 3/5 of 35 - a KS2 level question, can she do it:

• When presented as 'What is 3/5 of 35?'
• When presented as an 'empty box' problem such as 3/5 of __ = 21
• When presented as a 1-step word problem: Tw2k has 35 pencils. She gives out 3/5 of them - how many pencils is this?
• When presented as a 2-step word problem: Tw2k has 35 pencils. She gives Bob and Georgia 1/5 of the pencils each. How many pencils does she have left?

I teach a low Maths set, and many of them have one of the two difficulties above when taking Maths tests. One is that they find it hard to retrieve the specific technique they need to answer a question when presented with a set of mixed questions. Another is that they are used to having a question posed in a particular form, and don't know what to do if there is even a very slight 'twist' to that form.

Another very common difficulty my pupils have is in retaining key facts - does your DD know all her number bonds (addition and subtraction facts to 100) and all her times tables and inverse division facts to 12 x 12 with instant recall? f she doesn't - even if she did once, she may not still - then that is an easy but very important thing to do over the holiday.

Oh, and how good is she at 'following procedures'? I have taught a dyscalculic who could follow procedures - so could actually carry out complex written calculations because they were a set of simple steps, which they could follow in order - despite having very poor grasp of underlying principles. Another dyscalculic child I taught could not follow procedures, and that necessitated a different approach.

You probably know this already, but

www.satspapers.org.uk/Page.aspx?TId=5 is a good source of the KS2 Maths papers - can she still do these? Where does she struggle?

I suppose I am working from the starting point that your DD is unlikely to have gone from 'good understanding at KS2, even if gained rather slowly' to '7-14% after a term of KS3', especially as the Maths test they gave her is very, very unlikely to contain ONLY what she has studied this term (that's almost impossible in Maths, because so much relies on what has been learned before).

So what you can help your DD and her new school find out is what is missing from her understanding of KS2 Maths, to identify the gaps that need to be filled in / continuously reinforced to enable her to access the KS3 work appropriately with support.

If she hasn't already done all the old KS2 maths papers, you [or your DH, or a tutor, or an older teenage friend, or whoever] could perhaps work through some with her, again as a diagnostic test?

Thank you for taking the time teacher

You are very supportive.

I can answer one of your questions straight away.

Yes, she would struggle with mixed questions.
If you give her a sheet of similar type she will remember the system and tackle them making a few careless mistakes but generally most will be right.
Mixed with others she will sometimes struggle to remember the system.
Mental Maths is similar, if you give her a couple of pages even if they are mixed she will manage them well, but a couple mixed in with others and she will struggle.

Times tables are also good if she is actually doing them but to use them from cold takes some effort , iyswim.
If I sat her down and tested her she would be fine and recall them all and dividing too.

My personal opinion is that she struggles with adding more complex parts to things she has known more basically.
Equations is particularly difficult for her. It took a long time for her to grasp basic simple equations, now it is harder she is struggling, then panics and believes she can't do it.
She will tell us and her teachers she is rubbish and doesn't get it. Her confidence is low and she thinks she is stupid.
I tell her she is just a little slower at Maths and we can't all be good at everything and she must try.

That sounds like she needs lots of reinforcement of the things she can do, gradually increasing the variety in each set, so that the building blocks become more automatic and comfortable. Imagine building a house of cards - if all the lower tiers were just about balanced kind of, keeping going up without it falling will be difficult. If you were to glue the lower tiers in place before building higher, you'll get a taller construction!

If you yourself have a history of maths problems then I would think even more that getting some sort of assessment would be helpful - but talk to the school about how to arrange this. If it is done with a clear set of questions then a report is more likely to come back with useful answers as to what to do now.

It probably won't help her that, as music and maths so often "go together" there may be a lot of very good instinctive mathematicians in her class. But you might be able to think of a way to phrase that to turn it to her advantage, eg that in a different school there would be more students finding maths harder.