Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School careless errors, rushing etc. Help

My DD6 is creative, and great with the big picture, understanding concepts, problem solving and timed math drills (completing them four times faster than the goal time and is highly accurate with these), but she is making careless errors on important math tests beyond her grade and in daily writing.

In math, she understands concepts very easily and that is clear, but she skips problems (not ones she doesn't understand), forgets to label (as in writing 27 as an answer not 27 inches and that gets marked wrong), or other minor, but costly errors.

In writing, she is highly creative and a good speller but she throws in uppercase letters in the middle of sentences etc. and forgets punctuation.

These types of mistakes bother and confound her teacher and affect my DD'S grade and may affect gifted programming.

I do not know how to help my DD6 be more careful, check work, and just do better on details all around. She has been reminded on the same things for two years.

When she has reading testing, it is extremely high, at least fifth grade, and as I said, her writing is very creative and she writes little books all the time. She is given math one year ahead and gets 100% on grade level math tests, but an important placement test, the amount of careless errors were shocking to me. All of the math was fairly easy and below her level that she could do at home. I don't think it was that it was too easy that she tuned out because she was flawless at the grade level. I do wonder if they gave her the advanced test right after pages and pages of the grade level one and she was just done.

She has had trouble in the classroom with kids acting out and a punitive teacher (she is never in trouble but gets upset when kids are harshly reprimanded) so this may play into things, but she has always been great with the big picture and spotty with the small stuff. Is there anything I can do to help her be more detail oriented so it isn't used against her?

First thing to say is that looking back over your posts she *is* making progress and in fact there may be a pattern of her doing a leap shortly after you get really frustrated! She is 6...

That said, one thing that helps my DS to focus on details is to make it explicitly adversarial - get him to imagine an evil faceless system that would just love to take a mark off him for something he understands perfectly well, except that he's not going to give it the satisfaction. He used to say, e.g., "Aha, they think I'll forget the "inches", but it's not so easy to fool me!". It's probably best to avoid making an actual human teacher the adversary though, and it does need to be explicitly a game!

i'll second this! it's brilliant.

my daughter (5) was constantly getting held up on those horrible levelled readers they use in class - she would read the beginning of the sentence, and then fill in a more complex ending, adding details and improving the vocab. comprehension-wise, she would be bang-on because she predicts so well - but the teachers would mark her down for not always reading the exact words on the page.

we literally had to tell her - hey, this is the way they mark these readers: you lose a point every time you have to go back and correct yourself. she still hates the readers with the fire of a thousand suns, but she understands that reading for the teachers is a test, and for tests, she has to ask her brain to work differently - which (bonus!) actually grows it in a new way.

Thanks, Colinsmum, I like that idea and in some ways that is how I see it. These details are not important and they do not interfere with meaning, but the big bad rules police will fine you if they catch you not labeling (the horror), skipping punctuation, and missing a problem. She may be making progress in this area, but it is much slower than I had hoped!

TwinkleToes, she's only 6 - does her school really police this type of thing at 6? Being all about the big picture and spotty with the details isn't at all unusual at 6. Our kids' schools saw these types of things as developmental and not all kids are "there" yet at 6 (even PG kids)... so school separated out the skills - for instance, our schools were big on allowing inventive spelling, and for things like caps in the middle of words etc - if the exercise was a free-writing exercise or a science study or something like that, they weren't even marked or noted. If the exercise was language and they were specifically working on grammar/punctuation/composing sentences or paragraphs etc - the incorrect things would be circled and noted and that was it.

Re skipping over problems all together - my dd who has an extremely high working memory and processing speed used to do this all the time. She's in 3rd grade now and still does it some, but it's gotten better as she's gotten older. In her case she's a kid who's always in a hurry to be on to whatever is next and check the current task off her to-do list. We've explained and reminded her that she needs to slow down and make sure she does her work carefully, but I think what helped the most with that was simply maturing a bit.

You mentioned this is bother her teacher - does her teacher have any suggestions? You also mentioned it might affect gifted programming - is she in a gifted program now or do you hope to place her in one next year? Does the school track students based on grades? What type of measures do they use for their gifted program and how is it implemented?

polarbear

Thanks, Polarbear.

I agree that it is developmental, but apparently, these things are a thorn in her teacher's side and do affect grading. They do not have an gifted program for this year, but have been giving her out of grade work, and would expect her to receive greater enrichment next year.

They use her ability to remember to go to an enrichment folder on her own after doing grade level work, then extra work, then the grade up work, to judge whether she "needs" enrichment" instead of seeing that at that point she is sick of worksheets. They also enjoy pointing out errors that I mentioned (an uppercase letter in the middle of a sentence, a skipped problem, forgetting to put a name on a paper) against her and seem to relish pointing these things out even though from day one I said executive functioning skills were a work in progress and we have outside testing showing very high cognitive skills (third grade level in preschool).

She is flawless on all reading tests and her reading is so out there that at this point they said even if she "bombed" the test they just took, she would be in their gifted program for reading. Her writing in terms of plot and vocabulary is quite extraordinaty, but as I said, she sometimes uses the wrong case or forgets punctuation and this causes her to be graded "at grade level" even though she writes whole books with vocabulary light years ahead while some kids in her class barely put together a sentence. Their entire system is frustrating to me.

My DD9 still does a fair bit of this (leaves her name off papers, accidentally skips problems, forgets to write units of measure or AM/PM, forgets little things like the fact that she is supposed to underline and circle certain things in certain math problems or write paragraph numbers next to reading comprehension answers). The substance of her answers is right 98% of the time, but she loses points for these little mistakes. It's annoying, but has never been mentioned as a serious concern. I think it's VERY common for the kids in her GT magnet, and in fact I know that she is not considered to have a rushing/careless work problem compared to others in her class. I often take it as a sign that the work is too easy and she's cruising. She doesn't do it enough to lose a lot of points. It's like, 2 points here, 2 points there.

Thanks for your insight, Ultramarina, it makes me feel better. Complaints about these minor mistakes in the bulk of parent teacher conferences. Perhaps the actual gifted teacher will be more understanding and focus on the fact that she understand things, is creative, etc. I was starting to worry about attention problems since we have wondered about that all along, but it sounds as though some fairly typical students do the same thing. Thanks so much for sharing your experiences.

I do think DD's school tends to pull in gifties who tend towards the less NT side of things. You have to want to be there--the school is on the quote-unquote bad side of town and it's an effort and a disruption to switch schools. I feel like the kids tend towards the more extreme and kids who were not doing well in regular programs. So I think the population is different than, say, a GT pull-out in a typical wealthy school. Still, I judst don't think what ou describe is of much concern in a 6yo unless it's every or every other problem on every worksheet. Once or twice per page--piffle. BTW, my DD has straight As.

My daughter is the same way; I believe it's related to her innate competitiveness. She doesn't care so much about being right, she wants to be done first! Her 2nd grade teacher suggested we wait to do WISC for her until 3rd grade, since she recognized the rushing would impact her score and she wanted to work on that with her first. Her 3rd grade teacher paired her with another gifted boy and so since they were both quick, the competition started to include not only being done first, but being done right, too. Loved, loved those two teacher.

Now in 4th grade, her teacher is so not the nurturing type and is very strict and thorough. DD has brought home numerous homework assignments with a "correct and return" stamp on them because she was not thorough in her answers. DD hates re-doing work, so this has REALLY helped her in the rushing/carelessness area. And to be fair to the teacher, if DD does the next homework assignment well/thoroughly, the teacher makes a point to note that on the homework as well. I love that "correct and return" stamp, LOL! I know it's so old-school, but it has really helped with DD.