What can we expect from a 10 year old?

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The level of skill in writing is only limited by a few factors; the child’s vocabulary, their exposure to the use of grammar and their imagination/observation.

If you have spoken to them in a way which has encouraged the development of a wide language structure, they will incorporate that into their writing very quickly, because to them, it is normal to use those words. The grammar knowledge often comes from the books they are exposed to, not only the ones they read on their own but also he books you read with them. If they see the use of commas, colons and semi colons, speak marks and paragraphs they will absorb the use of them as they would the words they hear. I have often worked with children who by the age of 10 are able to produce highly sophisticated pieces of poetry or prose which would be comparable to a 16 year olds submission for GCSE. To them it is natural.

So can this be encouraged? It most certainly can and by exposing them to the language will start that process.

I have produced a manual of words which appear on the 11 plus verbal reasoning paper, and this challenges the year 5 pupils to learn the meanings of the words [please note the spelling is irrelevant] and to then incorporate them into passages or stories. What words are these? Well, here is one list:

Economical     Fatal   Provoke   Adopt   Domestic

Origin   Quaint   Scripture   Ambition   Sturdy

Restore   Sleek   Sincere   Proportion   Procure

The aim was to write a 300 word story about themselves or someone in the family which included at least nine of these words. To do this they had to know the various connotations of the words and then weave something which incorporated them. To many parents and teachers they would think this beyond them but to be honest unless you give them a challenge to aspire to how high will you know they can reach?

Some of the sentences and paragraphs incorporating theses words are enclosed below.

•     … so she adopted a wild animal instead of the domesticated cat.

•     … Ben had provoked an argument with his brother over football and then George took Ben’s figure from him. It was obviously a favourite figure because Ben was moaning and crying, so George restored into Ben’s hands.

•  We left the café and saw the deer with their sleek and shiny coats. They were so cute I wanted to adopt one!

•  “Where are we going?” I asked in confusion. “It’s a surprise,” replied dad with a cheeky grin on his face. We drove to the station and dad asked the man behind the counter for a ticket to London. The helpful man replied it would be more economical if we got a family ticket…….

•   .. the first place we visited were the sturdy gun turrets……… made our way to the rest of the ship to see the domestic arrangements for the sailors……… we noticed a quaint chapel…. Being on the ship provoked thoughts of what it must have been like for the sailors….

What can 10 year old's achieve? Sometimes a lot more than eventhey realise until we throw down the challenge.

The language of failure

Its so frighteningly common to hear a child as young as 5 or 6 stating they have failed, when really they have only just begun the learning process of growing into an adult. That word, failure, can halt the progress of an individual in its tracks, to a point where they can become unwilling to try anything new.

I work with adults who, for some reason or other, have reached a point in their lives where they are unable to move forward in something they would like to do. So often when it is explored, we discover things which have happened in the past and stopped them then are stopping them now. My aim is to give children the opportunity to move forward with a 'can do' belief rather than an 'its hard one'.

If you allow your child to continually express the phrase, 'Its hard,' they will believe that statement in the end. So, if they don't believe it when they are using it, why are they saying it?
Its to get you to help them, to step in and make it easy for them.

Whilst children, we only have very rudimentary knowledge of the value of a word. To a child, the word 'hard' means the opposite of 'easy' and that to them means someone does it for them in the way mum or dad has done everything for them up until now.
If you think about it, as a very young child we tie their shoes laces, cut up their food, buy their treats, put them to bed, magic the washing clean and dry, we do everything for them and they luxuriate in a five star hotel with love and protection thrown in as a free-be; quite a nice existence.
Then they get presented with something which lifts them out of this comfortable cocoon of wall-to-wall fun and we ask them to do something that is not generated from their fertile mind. Many respond by looking to the source of their luxury for them to take over and when we don't, they express the difficulty they are experiencing, that is, 'its hard'.
If we have been conditioned well enough by our children we automatically step in and help them. They continue to express difficulty and we do more and more of it, until they have stepped back far enough so as to allow us to do it. I often see this because it is at this point where a large grin comes onto the childs face, very similar to the one you see when they suddenly understand something.

Quick to learn, slow to reset.

What have we taught them? We have taught them, if they say its hard, we will step in and do it for them. 

Question: When do you think this falls down and fails to reward them in the way they want?
Answer: Its around the time when the, 'its hard' phrase, takes on a whole new meaning; I don't have the skills to know how to approach something that is hard [outside my current understanding] because until now, my mum or dad has done it for me.

Can you see how the feeling of failure can grow?

OK, so you've already fallen in the trap and they are saying its hard and you have to break  them of the need to rely on you, because you know this is not a good strategy to rely upon, how do you move forward now?

Firstly do not think you have failed, you've done something without being aware of how it can affect them later, so its not a failure its a temporary hiccup on the way. Another very quick way of learning is to mimic your parents and if they feel failure then the child will go out of its way to make sure it learns it too, sadly its a matter of instinct.
Here are a few strategies to employ, I use them all in different situations and they work well.

Strategies to use:

Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.

Response: Is it, mm, so what is making it hard, which part of it is the problem?

Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.

Response: I'm thinking we need to get to the bottom of this question and find out what it wants you to do..

Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.

Response: Can't do it or wont do it? What do you mean by that statement?

Comment: Its hard, I can't do it.

Response:I know dear, but really, you can do it, just not yet because you haven't worked out how to do the question that's all.

The responses above give you an idea of how to use language to push the problem back in their direction but at the same time be helpful to them in giving clues. Then you can use the plan of supporting them in working out the problem as shown in the article,"Whose homework is it anyway, part 2".

I can't do it............

One of the biggest problems I come across when working with children is the learned response to something which poses a problem. They are being asked to step outside their current understanding and explore something new; it isn't straight forward, they do not come up with the 'right' answer straight away and give up.

Why? Because they do not have the strategies in place for dealing with a state of confusion.

One of the world's most eminent philosophers, Nietzsche, said, "out of chaos comes order". What he meant by this is, you have to go through a stage of not knowing something [the chaos] to learn it and then understand it [the order]. This is the element of learning which is missing, when your child says, they can't do it, or, its hard, or, I'm useless, I've failed. In a child's mind, the connection between can't do something and failing is close and has to be handled carefully before it becomes an established pathway to a lack of self esteem and the desire to give up and the slightest difficulty.

So, let's look at this process a bit more closely and work out, where, as parents we can intercept this path and divert it into one of exploration, where they feel confident within themselves not to  get the 'right answer' each time they do something.

 A question I used to pose new teachers I was training in the classroom was, why do we teach children? What, as teachers is our role in a child's life and how can we do that effectively? This equally applies to parents, what is it that parents teach and what role, in teaching, do they form within that child's life?

Put in that context, we can start to un-pick the responsibilities as it were, within a child's development and share the teaching, rather than what often happens at the moment, both fight over one another to teach the child the same thing but using different methods and employing different loyalties within the child. So what role does each have and where does the overlap come? Interesting thought and one worth pondering.

As teachers, we take the child into the world of known facts and introduce them to the wealth of knowledge the world has already gained. We cannot show them all of it because every day that knowledge gets more and more, but we can show them how to do the major skills our society feels is important for everyone in that society to know. We turn them to face the past and show them what has gone before; we invite  them to learn how to do/learn these skills and reward them for successfully doing them - making each child like everyone else in that society with a similar knowledge base.

Where, however, do new ideas come from?

We have words for these people - innovators, explorers, thinkers, genius', even scientists, philosophers and psychologists. All very grand words which seem to separate these people into a 'super-race', but why? All children are capable of being innovators, of exploring the world around them, of thinking things through for themselves and coming up with something novel [ the definition of which is, new and unusual, not seen before, a new approach]. So why not teach them this? Why not allow them the room to continue their exploration of the world? Why restrict their 'learning' into being taught how to do things we, as a society already know and not give them the tools to think for themselves as well?

A child is an amazing piece of kit; they have a brain poised to absorb everything it is given. They have sets of neurons [brain cells] just sitting waiting for stimulation, to be switched on and used to their fullest capacity, so why not give them the privilege of giving them the opportunity?

If you are saying yes to this then read on............

Puzzles, games, exploring/visiting new places, experiencing new skills, joining clubs and organisations which take them to camps, adventure playgrounds, learning about life from a fun perspective.

Why do you think so many Australian and American students travel? They're not afraid to do it!

 As teachers, we can introduce the element of exploration through various methods and as a rule do many of them, but the one which I feel is missed in both camps is the one Nietzsche mentioned, the one which allows the child to be in chaos before they can find new order. How do we do that? We show them the way of exploring, using their own strategies, and one of the best ways of doing this is through topics such as non verbal reasoning and verbal reasoning. By their very name, you can see they are expecting the child to do some thinking, to become thinkers themselves and process through, to find the most logical answer. In some cases there is no one answer but a range of answers that can be proved to be true by the explanations given. Is that not the basis of an innovator? By taking facts they know and placing them into the melting pot of the problem they 'feel' their way through to the answer and come up with something which is logical to them. Is that not the start of an explorer? They take paper and scissors and replicate the problem then explore in the physical world the process of working to wards an end point. Is that not the beginnings of a scientist?
In this world there is no failure, just a range of possible answers; no-one can reach a point of 'not being able to do it' because no-one can do it, its a conundrum which needs a logical answer.

If we want to take the pain out of learning we have to give them the fun back

If a child doesn't understand a fact, then the teaching hasn't addressed something in the child, not the other way round! If the child isn't willing to try something that may not have a concrete answer it has to be taught how to 'let go' of the need for right answers all the time and that is done through the language of the adult who is with them.
In the next blog I will start to review how we talk about failure and failing and how that has a direct impact on children. I will also show you some language patterns which may help you adjust your attitude toward failing and therefore allow the child to change theirs.

The 11+ homework package

I have had a few calls regarding when the various home works have to be done and some mums have really got worried they had to get more done than they have to.

The way the homework works is that every time the children come to me activates the next homework file, so this week and last week activate only the first file, homework 1.

So for clarity lets go through it once more;

1. The Verbal Reasoning Word Manual - print that off and start working with your child on learning the meanings of the words. There is a piece of work to do with each list which once completed I will mark. There are 18 word lists and I would expect you to work through 6 each term, so by Christmas you should be at the end of list number 6, by Easter, list number 12 and July, list number 18. I will work with the pupils on these words and presume they will know the meanings by those times.

2. The Verbal Reasoning Audio Answer Book - along side the manual there are audio files, which I haven't given you yet, and this is the booklet for the answers to be done in. I will mark all of the work.

3. There is a third pdf which shows all the homework files contents, this is so you can make sure it is all completed.

4. The homework files themselves; these generally contain WORD and EXCEL w/sheets. I will explain how the EXCEL worksheets work when we start to use them as they are read only and will not save once the pupil has written on them. They are interactive so they will tell your child whether they are right or wrong, so they do not need to be printed off before they use them.

Dates for each homework file is kept in the waiting room and it is displayed on the noticeboard. If you look at the bottom of the timetable for when pupils attend there is a number and that corresponds to the homework you are on.

Once they have completed the work and it is printed off, then place it in the 'To Do' section at the front of the folders and I will be able to mark and place it in the correct place. Do this with all tests, sheets and word lists.

Once you have settled to doing this it does get easier and you will find in the end the pupils themselves will be telling you what they need run off and what they have to do, so no worries, any questions or concerns, please contact me.

All the best to you all and I will see you at over the next few weeks.

Whose homework - part 2

Last time I left you rather in the lurch. I gave you lots of what not to do, but gave no indication of what to do when supporting your child with the homework they have to do. I told you what the work was for and why it’s set, what the teacher would be looking for and what this would lead onto, but now, it’s time to tell you how to enhance the homework experience.

The aim of the support is to enhance their understanding, not take over, and that, without realising is what happens, when mum or dad are roped into helping them.

Many moons ago, I took on a new Teaching Assistant. She was going to be brilliant but first she had to get through the ‘helping’ stage. At the end of the first term, she and I collapsed in our classroom. The children had left for the Christmas holidays and left chaos in their wake. We were sitting quietly having coffee when she looked over and said, “I am shattered, how do you remain so calm and at ease? You don’t even look stressed and I have been running around all over the place...”

I smiled at her, “Exactly, I don’t run after them like an Auntie, I expect them to think things through for themselves and ask me when and where they get stuck. At the moment they have hot and cold running answers from you and they don’t have to do the work to get the answers.” I laughed at the expression on her face, which was staring at me with a look of complete shock, horror, and then realisation.

“I’ve been played haven’t I? Mm, well that will stop in January, you just watch!”

True to her word, she did, and became the best teaching assistant I have ever had the pleasure of working alongside. In fact, I would go as far as to say, she taught small groups superbly, but she had to learn the crucial lesson first:

Answer what they need not what they want.

So how do you get at what they need?

There are four main phases of support:

1.       Read and understand the question

2.       Identify what the question is asking them to do

3.       Decide what skills they will need and in what order

4.       Complete the task

Let’s take each of these stages and explain, as I did to Ginny, how to input into each stage without having to do any of the work.

1.       Read and understand the question

a.       Get them to read the question to you. If they stumble on any of the words, support them by breaking the word down into sections, or phonics, or syllables, whichever is pertinent to their teaching style/method.

b.      Check they understand the words they have stumbled over [if any] and just read, by getting them to tell you the question again but using their own language. This checks that they are interpreting it correctly.

2.       Identify what the question is asking them to do

a.       Now let them tell you what the question is asking them to do. This sometimes comes out in the first part where you are asking them to explain the question; children often short track this stage and can sometimes mix the next stage into it as well. Get them to develop this strategy of 4-STEPS, have it written on a card for them to follow, it will help tremendously in organising their thinking.

b.      Underline the important pieces of information, or if you cannot do that, write them down on a piece of scrap paper, well, they write them down, you do nothing, you are supporting remember?

3.       Decide what skills they will need and in what order

a.       They have written down or underlined the important information, now it’s time to sort out the arithmetic skills they need to use. THIS is where you MUST NOT SHOW THEM. If they stumble over how to do a skill this is something the teacher needs to know, so make a note of it, or better still get them to write it in their books that they couldn’t remember how to do, say, adding fractions. It’s all important information to the teacher.

b.      Presuming they can do the skills, they then process them. Ginny would say to them, “Now we’ve got that far, I’m off to [help someone else maybe] but if you forget what you’re doing then call me.” This gave them the knowledge she was there, but the independence of doing it for themselves.

4.       Complete the task

a.       They do the work on their own and you then give them the praise for managing it on their own. They get the buzz from doing it on their own and the reminder of how to do the various arithmetic tasks.

Please, don’t presume I would expect this to go without a hitch, it won’t. There will be days when your child will want the re-assurance of mummy or daddy with them. They will crave the close support, the attention, and possibly the persuasive possibility of getting you to do it for them. Resist! Resist with all your might.

Ginny would look at these children and smile; she had been run ragged by them during that first term. She would get out the card with the 4-STAGE plan on it and go through it with them again to check their processing. She would them let them do say the first part and then come back and give the re-assurance required, only to leave again once they had moved onto another stage of the arithmetic. She had learnt that some children work better if the task is first gone through up until the last stage and then repeated so they feel more secure.

“OK, so we have gone through the question again and we have worked out exactly what you have to do to get the answer. We have found some examples of how to do each of the arithmetic skills in your book and now all you have to do is to follow them and do this question. I can’t wait to see your answer – bet it’ll be right too”, and with that she would smile and walk away.

Whose homework is it anyway? Part 1

The children are back at school, school run mum gets into full swing, and the towns and villages have once more accepted the change in routine as they notice the traffic increase at salient times.

The teachers have re-grouped over the summer too and they are full of the good intentions a new year brings; Ofsted is always yapping at their heels, so ‘value added’, ‘targets’, and ‘target setting ‘are high on the agenda. New registers to fill in, grades forms to establish, new names, new faces, new children, new teachers. Will Ofsted come this year? This term? What hoops will I have to jump through this year to be satisfactory or above? Homework, I must set that each week, when is it due? When do I set it? Is there a homework plan for this term?

The children sit in potentially new classrooms with teachers they may not know; will the teacher like me? Will I make new friends quickly? Do I know anyone in my class? They have new pencil cases and new pens, they get new books to work in and write their names on the front cover. They have lockers, maybe, or places to put coats, or they may have to carry everything around with them all day. They get diaries and in them, they write their class, their name, their teacher, and their homework timetable. Oh, dear, so much to do and when will I fit in athletics, cricket, or time to do my judo, swimming? I want to see my friends and watch television; I can’t miss my favourite programmes.

Don’t worry it all fits in, and surprisingly easily after a while, it just needs adjusting to after the complete freedom of the summer. Maybe that is the problem and the summer schools of the USA are a good idea. They create a routine, which although has nothing to do with school, maintains a balance in their lives so returning to lessons isn’t quite such a shock... but I digress.

Mums and dads listen to all the happenings of the day as the children fall out through the school gates and into the school taxi (mum’s car) and rapidly tell of everything that has happened which they consider of relevance and importance. To us some of it is trivial, but in a child’s mind, these small things are monumental and need to be told loudly and forcefully. Everything is emotionally extreme, the food is too gross, the lessons too boring, the people too nice, everything over the top, and then homework, there’s too much, it can’t be done, there’s no time.

The mistake? As parents, we want to make everything as ‘nice and wonderful’ for our children as we can, we want them to relax and have fun, after all they’ve been in school all day. We want them to do what they want; for some parents its easier than arguing, for others they feel it’s their child’s right, and others, well they fret if they see their child ‘suffering’. We want the very best for our children so... we take the burden from them to some extent:

Χ      Give me five minutes and I’ll come and do it with you.

Χ      In a minute, and we’ll do it together

Χ      Do you want some help with that?

Χ      Are you stuck, let me help you

Χ      You don’t like maths, no, neither do I, ask your dad when he gets in

Χ      I didn’t like doing homework either, leave it we’ll do it tomorrow

Χ      Oh, don’t worry I know it’s too hard for you, I’ll talk to your teacher in the morning.

The list goes on and I have heard all of them, but do any of them help the child? I don’t want to be nit-picky here, but there are a few cherries I would like to bring into focus.

If you tell your child you were bad at a subject when you where at school you are giving them permission to be bad at it also.

Are you absolutely sure that’s what you are wanting to convey to your child? I have met few children who have overcome the phrase, “I was lousy at maths” and become good at it themselves. In fact, I would say only one child ever rose above his dad’s comment and that was because he was determined to prove he was better than him (a parenting issue which resulted in the child performing out of his socks in all areas). The rest used it as an excuse to not worry and eventually, stop trying to understand and then give up. It was sad for me to watch potentially bright and able children switch out of learning because their parents had given them permission to fail. The irony was, they would look to me as if I had committed the cardinal sin and yet I was up against a stronger enemy, them themselves.

OK, I feel better, that’s one cherry focused upon and hopefully digested, now to another, and it’s this one; if homework is set, who is it set for? Do you know why it is set, and what function it serves?

OK, I doubt many have really thought about it, but what function does homework serve? It certainly isn’t for the teacher’s benefit, it doubles the work load creating marking and grading which most can do without (and before you say, no, they usually end up marking this sort of work after school before they go home, or take it home and do it once they have attended to their own families). If teachers had their way and were able to take a vote, I suspect many would like to see the extreme reduction in any homework, but they also know the benefits of it so are placed in a quandary; do they want it stopped because it’s easier for them, or keep it, because it can be beneficial for the children? Mm, nasty choice; on the one hand parents would have less to moan about (they hate that) but on the other, does Sally really have the hang of punctuation on her own, and has Brian managed to sort out the order of decimals for himself?

Homework is a way of re-enforcing work learned during the day.

It checks up on whether the new concepts have gone into the medium term memory or have been lost by the time they get home. It re-ignites thoughts the class had and pushes ideas into a different part of the brain ready for retrieval next lesson.

Now if we do this work, does the teacher have any idea? Was the exercise a success? Does Brian or Sally really have the ideas and concepts, or do her parents? How will they cope, because now it is presumed they can do it (after all the evidence is there in their books), and are given the next steps ON THEIR OWN. And we wonder why children find it hard to build on early knowledge that appears not to be there...

BUT I WANT TO HELP MY CHILD!! Yes, and you should, but how is for the next blog entry, speak again soon.