Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Careless mistakes?

Hi there,

I have really joined your forum to ask one question - although I will explain the background to it a little first.

My daughter is 7 years old - we are in the UK, so she is in Year 2 at school. I have been told all the way through school so far (3 different teachers before this year's teacher)that dd is exceptionally able academically, and I would say all the teachers so far have been very positive about her thirst for learning and the way she seeks out learning opportunities for herself. We don't have any "test" results to corroborate a high iq, so I don't know if she is gifted as such, but she is clearly an intelligent child.

However, this year her teacher, whilst agreeing that my daughter is very able, constantly complains that Eleanor makes "careless" mistakes - for example missing out capital letters and full stops, whilst having speech marks and more complex grammar correct in her work, or spelling simple words which she DOES know incorrectly. She also said to me today that she gets the feeling that my daughter would be happiest if she were allowed to be in charge of the whole class, rather than the teacher....

Anyway, my gut instinct is that Eleanor is not being challenged at school, and that she makes silly mistakes because she is bored and rushing through the "tedious" stuff. But then, maybe I am just making excuses for her.... I really just wanted to ask - is this common with bright children? To make silly mistakes in simple work?

Thanks for reading,

Oakie

Welcome, Oakie!

I do hope you stick around. There are a lot of really helpful and knowlegeable people here and it sounds like you belong.

I just wanted to reassure you that, to my knowledge, this is very common among gifted kids. When you don't have to fully engage your mind to complete a task, you're obviously much more liable to make careless mistakes. Harder work requires more attention and usually results in a gifted child making fewer mistakes, not more.

I remember consistenly scoring very well on high-level math problems on all the standardized exams and getting high scores, but when you looked at the breakdown, my lowest scores were always on the basic computation sections, and not because I couldn't add and subtract! I've seen this with my kids and their school work as well. And while I understand it and am okay with it (really, I am!) it can be frustrating when you're asking for more academic challenge for your child and they keep pointing to the silly mistakes they make as an excuse for not offering the proper challenge.

Hope this helps!

We've got the same issues. I think my child actually misspelled his name during his first grade year, and that was hardly a new skill for him! Harder work has definitely helped some, but we still have issues. We're now pursuing an evaluation to look at executive functioning and see what's happening. We have issues where he'll say the answer is 47 but just write, "4" or say that the answer is 300, and leave off all the 0s when he writes the answer.

In other words, I'll be anxiously reading the other replies because I need some input on this issue too.

Same thing here. DS9 (3rd grade) can verbally score 100% on all his classwork but last trimester, he brought home TONS of failing papers -- all but one or two errors for the entire trimester were because of carelessness. He will complete one half of a paper, and then just not answer the other half -- sometimes he forgets to turn the page over, and other times he just stops and doesn't finish. His answer is always that he didn't see it. How can you just NOT SEE the bottom half of a page of a test?!!!!

I agree wholeheartedly that for things that DS finds challenging, we are MUCH less likely to see the careless mistakes. Interestingly, the teacher now offers pre-tests, where the students can test out of the regular lecture/work by scoring 92% or better -- and they receive differentiated work. DS RARELY makes any careless errors on the pre-tests. So, motivation can help!

I've heard others who have posted here say that they've had frank discussions with their DC in those instances where the child has expressed boredom/lack of challenge AND the teacher is citing their carelessness as a proof that additional challenge is not appropriate. The parents might tell their DC that they understand that the child needs more challenge, but that the teacher won't consider harder work when the DC is unable to do the current work satisfactorily. They ask the DC to try to be more careful, and explain that they'll try to work with the teacher to get more appropriate level work.

HTH! Best of luck!

Hello! I don't have any brilliant ideas but if it helps any, your description fits my ds10...Common mistakes are his middle name...I chuckled when your daughter's teacher thought she would be happiest teaching the class. We hear that every year haha Welcome!

My son is the same age, and does the exact same thing. His AIG teacher told me that it's a very common thing when a gifted child (or any child, for that matter) is not being challenged and is bored. Don't know a thing about the education system works in the UK, but I would definitely discuss your concerns with the teacher.

Welcome (from the UK, though I'm in Scotland where quite a lot is different). As everyone says, yes it's common for bright children to make mistakes on simple things. I did want to comment, though, that I think the right response depends a bit on what it is. When a child who can do multi-digit multiplication is being given page after page of single-digit addition and gets some wrong, it's reasonable to ignore the silly mistakes because the task was inappropriate. But if a child is being given a writing task which, overall, is at the right level, but is making basic mistakes while not making more "advanced" mistakes, that's a rather different situation. My experience is that (unlike much else) writing assignments for this age group are largely self-differentiating: e.g., asked to write a story about a castle, an advanced child might use more complex language, have more interesting characters, etc. - the task itself would be appropriate for any age (even if the expectations of what would be produced were off). Is it in that kind of situation that your DD is making these basic errors? Or are they only or mostly showing up only in situations where the task really is inappropriate, e.g. some very tedious comprehension exercise?

If it's the first, then the errors seem less analogous to the mistakes on pages of single-digit arithmetic. It's more as though the child was getting wrong answers to the multi-digit multiplication because of errors in the single-digit addition that has to be done as part of the multiplication. After all, there isn't an advanced level of writing at which it no longer matters whether you capitalise correctly or can spell simple words. (Well, maybe once you're writing with a word processor that can correct you...) In this case I might have a chat with her and point out explicitly that the simple things are still important even after you learn to do harder things.

Or maybe this is a sign of a general lack of engagement with school, due to boredom, so that even when she does get a task that would be suitable she still rushes through it? What does she say she thinks of school work? What do you think of the school and her teacher? What kind of record do they have of differentiating effectively?

As a parent, this is very frustrating to see. My DD7 is highly competitive and wants to be the first one finished with her work. DD does have a tendency to rush through what she is doing. At school last year in 2nd Grade, she lost over 100 grade points total for not putting her name on her papers and additional points for leaving blanks. The teacher said that she jumped on any assignment immediately with intensity and excitement that is very rare for kids her age. (However, teacher also had a fun station in back of the room for kids to play at when they finished their work. Unfortunately, I did not find out about this until the last quarter!)

My DD just didn't seem to grasp the importance of careless mistakes, which may be some sort of maturity issue (or maybe an absentminded professor mentality).

This year, I took a different approach. DD has the option of filling in all the blanks once in school or she has to write the entire sentence, problem, etc. at home to make the corrections. She has a strong competitive streak to win, and I finally told her that the fastest kid in the class doesn�t win and the school tracks grades only. The kids with the highest grades win. The good news is that we have seen a drastic improvement in 3rd Grade with very few careless mistakes and unanswered blanks.

I will disagree, to some extent. Although I think you do get careless mistakes due to boredom, I think you also develop habits about stuff that is easy and just rushing through it that a child can be sloppy.

DD is like that. I know that when it was more of challenge, her handwriting was good, she took her time. And now she can be very careless that you think she made a mistake because the 9 looks like a 4 or crosses the top of her 0 and it could be a 6.

She has piano pieces that challenge her and she likes when she puts it together and can play it fast but it is "sloppy" in that it isn't perfect and her teacher likes it perfect. And she really has a habit of not pushing it to that limit and we fight. But I notice it in her ballet and gymnastics. Not that she won't ever go to perfect and do what is asked to make it really good, but she has developed some bad habits of sloppiness

---which may have started with easy tasks that bored her. But I see a trend even with challenge now.

Ren

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 :))