Thanks all for your responses - sorry it has taken me a few days to log back in.
So, consensus of opinion seems to be that it is fairly common for bright children to make silly/careless mistakes. But as has also been pointed out, it is often indicative of carelessness rather than boredom!
I have been doing a bit more enquiry into how my daughter is doing at school. She is well ahead in English, apparently (her reading age is 13 years, and she is 7) and she apparently writes complex sentences using interesting vocabulary and using things like question marks, speech marks, etc correctly. However she also sometimes incorrectly spells words that the teacher KNOWS she does know how to spell. Apparently she also often forgets full stops/capital letters. To be honest I am not wild about what she is being taught in literacy at school - as far as I can tell it is very much still going over phonics (which she has been doing over and over again for the past 4 years) and then being told to "write a sentence with the word "stamp" in, which doesn't really give her much range for creativity. Although when she is given a list of words to use, she does try to make a story from them all!
We have had a chat, this morning actually, about how marks get awarded for how accurate your work is, not for being the first one finished. There is another very bright child in the class (her best friend, actually) and they DO race one another - because having done *more* sums seems, in their heads, to equate to being *ahead* of the other one.
DD doesn't seem to be particularly ahead in maths - I am wondering if this is simply because she is not being given the opportunity to learn new material. She has recently taught herself multiplication, which hasn't been covered in her class, and recently scored 100% on a LEvel 2 maths paper, but got NOTHING right on a level 3 paper - which strikes me as very odd - if she is capable of doing all the level 2 work correctly then surely she should be able to do SOME level 3 stuff? (An explanatory note: in the UK, at the end of Yr 2, children are assessed - the average child will attain a level 2, and a few of the brighter children will get a level 3. The testing takes the form of 2 papers: a level 2 paper and a level 3 paper. Children take the level 2 paper first - if they score highly enough (I think it is 30 or 35/40) they then take the level 3 paper. If they score higher than 10/40 on the second paper they are considered to be "at level 3").
*sighs* I don't really know what to do. Frankly the UK education system is very geared up to getting everyone to the average level, and not really encouraging children to strive to be "above average". (Oh, and Colin'sMum - I am in Wales :))
