"I could be fast AND getting them right!,"

[Meriwether]

she said. Or not.

 

Dd9 works very quickly. I often caution her to slow down. She will finish her math - a Saxon lesson with the fact sheet, mental math, lesson, lesson practice and mixed practice and something else like LOF or CWP in about 45 minutes. Sometimes less. I graded a stack of papers today. She makes a lot of careless mistakes. She will transpose numbers when she is writing out the problem. She will think her zero is a six. She will forget to put the decimal points in her division answers. She will make a mistake on something very easy like 10 x 11 = 111 which completely messes up the multi-step problem.

 

I know we need to work on this, but I'm not sure how. I also don't know how typical this is. In four weeks, she missed 9/30 once, 7/30 once, 6/30 twice and 2-4/30 the rest of the time. No perfect papers. She should be getting perfect papers. She has no trouble understanding the concepts. Her facts are good - she can do 100 problems correctly in 3 minutes or less.

 

So, how do you get your kids to do their work well? I've tried giving her extra work for missed problems. She does it willingly, even cheerfully, and - quickly.:001_huh:

[Critterfixer]

Does she correct her own work?

[Diana B]

I would definitely have her taking the time to correct her own work AND add an additional problem for every problem she got wrong (assuming it was because of working too fast that she got it wrong). Only make it later, while she wants to be doing something else. And she has to keep correcting and doing additional work until she gets them right. The 'natural' consequence of it taking much longer than needed will hopefully slow her down.

 

You could also try teaching her to go back over her work before she hands it in. Maybe even set a timer where she has to go back over her paper for 5 minutes when she's done and check her work.

[Meriwether]

Does she correct her own work?

 

Yes. This isn't onerous or time consuming, though. She really does understand and can spot mistakes easily. She is starting to dislike being wrong in a more personal way. I don't know if she would do better work on her own as she gets older, but I don't want to take improvement for granted even if it is a possibility.

[EKS]

In our house, this was often a sign of the work being too easy. It was almost as if it was so easy, it wasn't worth paying attention to. Things would get much better when I would assign harder problems but fewer overall.

[Meriwether]

In our house, this was often a sign of the work being too easy. It was almost as if it was so easy, it wasn't worth paying attention to. Things would get much better when I would assign harder problems but fewer overall.

 

I see you have a 10yo doing Algebra. Was your child always advanced or did you move through the material faster? Dd is nine; she'll be 10 about the end of the school year. She is doing Saxon 7/6. I'll start her in Prealgebra next year. She might be ready for it now, but I'm not really comfortable advancing her yet. She's bright in a general way but math isn't really her thing. I have added some things to add breadth and depth. She is doing CWP, HOE, LOF and Patty Paper Geometry. I think the Saxon will be getting more difficult in a couple of weeks. Maybe I'll see improvement then.

[EKS]

I see you have a 10yo doing Algebra. Was your child always advanced or did you move through the material faster?

 

He is generally bright and so we started school early and moved through material more quickly. So it was a combination of being advanced and going faster. He finished arithmetic when he was 9 and then did a year of prealgebra. This year he is in school and we decided to have him do another year of prealgebra as a social placement, but when he is in the mood for a challenge, we are doing AoPS Intro to Algebra. If he had stayed home this year, we would have used Jacobs Algebra full strength.

[Critterfixer]

In our house, this was often a sign of the work being too easy. It was almost as if it was so easy, it wasn't worth paying attention to. Things would get much better when I would assign harder problems but fewer overall.

 

:iagree:I'd try this, since she is already correcting her own work. And she needs to keep doing that. Getting 100% on papers looks good, and tends to boost egos, but typically if I get 90 or higher it's probably time to move on to something else, and go back and review the previous material every now and then. If she's ready for climbing hills, let her loose on some hills.

 

Another way that has helped my boys slow down is to mix problems up. They tend to fly when they see that everything is the same. Change it up in the middle of the page and it's like a speed bump. This really helps my roadrunner drop down a gear or two.

[Meriwether]

:iagree:I'd try this, since she is already correcting her own work. And she needs to keep doing that. Getting 100% on papers looks good, and tends to boost egos, but typically if I get 90 or higher it's probably time to move on to something else, and go back and review the previous material every now and then. If she's ready for climbing hills, let her loose on some hills.

 

Another way that has helped my boys slow down is to mix problems up. They tend to fly when they see that everything is the same. Change it up in the middle of the page and it's like a speed bump. This really helps my roadrunner drop down a gear or two.

 

 

We use Saxon and there are many different kinds of problems on a page. I'm not sure how to make the problems significantly harder without going to Prealgebra. I'd also like for to learn to do everything correctly regardless of the situation.

[Meriwether]

I would definitely have her taking the time to correct her own work AND add an additional problem for every problem she got wrong (assuming it was because of working too fast that she got it wrong). Only make it later, while she wants to be doing something else. And she has to keep correcting and doing additional work until she gets them right. The 'natural' consequence of it taking much longer than needed will hopefully slow her down.

 

You could also try teaching her to go back over her work before she hands it in. Maybe even set a timer where she has to go back over her paper for 5 minutes when she's done and check her work.

 

 

I think I do need to insist on her looking over her work, but I think it would be daunting to do it at the end. My cousin recommended having a list of questions for her to ask after each problem: Did I copy it correctly?, Do I have decimals? Labels? Does my answer make sense?

 

Has anyone else done something like that? Was it effective? Do other kids her age struggle with this or have they outgrown these kinds of mistakes by 9?

[Jess4879]

My 8 (almost 9 year old) will rush things and make careless mistakes. What I started doing was circling the wrong answer and having her redo it during a time she'd really miss being apart of -- like tv time, or game time, etc. It generally only takes one missed "fun" time to get her to do a better job the next time around.

[Critterfixer]

I think it is pretty normal for children to make careless mistakes in all kinds of places.

 

I also think it can be tempting to want to enforce accuracy, to do all kinds of things to ensure that they don't make "silly errors". (I'm being nice--that is not what I called it or heard it called growing up.) I'm not sure that it can't backfire, particularly with driven or competitive children. I do have my guys correct their own mistakes, and I often point out an error in thinking or just simple forgetfulness. Not even sure I should be doing that, sometimes.

As much as it galls me to have to see mistakes that I think shouldn't have happened, I try just to let the natural consequence--correction--occur and nothing further than that. That's not easy for me. I'm very much a perfectionist myself, and I see the tendency in both of my boys.

Neither of them make the errors on purpose, and they are not sloppy in their work, so I feel pretty comfortable in saying that is is simply oversight on their part when they are not as focused for every problem.

 

 

I think I do need to insist on her looking over her work, but I think it would be daunting to do it at the end.

 

My guys are nowhere near as advanced in math as your daughter, but typically I tend to check the progress about half-way through a page of work. For a self-checker, perhaps she could run through a check-list every twenty problems or so?