A Bigger Confidence Boost

Following on from my previous post, DD1 finished the third of the maths SATS papers this morning.

She had been putting this off because she doesn't like arithmetic. She had done the two reasoning papers with no problems (though had omitted any of the arithmetic questions), and I wasn't surprised to see that she's above average for those two.  In fact, if she had been bothered to do the arithmetic questions, I think she could have got near full marks.  As it was, she did well enough over the 2 reasoning papers, that she only required 8 marks on the arithmetic paper in order to get 100/expected once the scores had been converted.

So this morning, whilst I was tutoring somebody downstairs, DD1 was upstairs doing the arithmetic paper.  When I had finished, I called her down to see how she did.  She was upset, because some of the things she knew how to do, she couldn't remember.  I tried to explain that happens to everybody, and it's ok.  DD1 is a perfectionist (which may be part of being on the spectrum?) and is comfortable with not knowing something, but if she has been taught something once, she feels like she should never make a mistake about that again.

Together we marked her paper.  From the first questions, she got 8 marks without a problem!  She did start to make some mistakes, or missed out some questions, but managed to get 26 marks over the whole paper, which converted to a score of 104 ie above the expected level for the end of Year 6! 

I also explained that things are taught in school much slower, where a topic is introduced, then there are examples that the teacher does, then you do questions, and more questions for homework, and when the topic comes around again later in the year or the next school year, there is a recap of what was learned previously.  I have no issues with DD1's ability to learn when things get repeated so often - if anything, my concern is that's she may act up if she's bored because she has remembered it the first time!

The only SATs paper left to do is the Reading/Comprehension one.  Given she was a fluent reader at the age of 3 (that's why we HEd in the first place), I'm not worried about this paper.  In fact, I don't really mind whether she does it or not - except for my own quirks that I want it done for completeness.