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ENGLISH • Re: Son struggles with English

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We were struggling with English this time last year too. Really strong Maths and VR but English not as good.
Are you in a superselective area or do you just need a pass? We were the latter and also didn't need a pass in each individual subject (just one overall pass mark) which helped us a lot and your strategy would probably be different to ours if your area is superselective and / or needed a pass in all separate subjects.
The main things which helped us were ..

- advice from this forum!

- accepted English wasn't as strong as Maths, so stuck with CGP 9- 10 books and even a few year 4 comprehension books to boost confidence (I never used any CGP English 10-11 books even towards the end but did use the Maths and VR 10-11 as he was fine with those and so was happy to stretch him further on those subjects)

- read some classics to him and paused at words he didn't know to talk about them (he liked goodnight Mr Tom, railway children) but accepted there was no way he would ever read them himself so didn't even try getting him to do that! Also chatted through what happened at end of each chapter, how was character feeling, what would you advise them to do, what do you think will happen next etc.

- got him some non fiction books which he would read with persuasion. He liked ones about nature / animals, volcanoes etc. He still didn't read many of them but every little helps!

- did comprehensions together to try make them a bit more palatable / relaxed for him. We'd take it in turns to read a chapter then talk through the questions some of the time rather than getting him to do them just on his own and write answers down.

- got the foxtons vocab cards which we picked a few every do often and talked through. He did find that boring though!

- we had a tutor for him but TBH for the English he needed one to one and little and often and I did all that with him, a tutor can only do so much.

- really tried to boost his confidence and tell him he was good at English ( which he is actually okay but he thinks he's terrible!). Really focused on timing with him too as he was rushing through it as didn't enjoy it. Had to get him to slow down!

Good luck! Scores on the 9- 10 books by the way were similar to your DC this time last year so definitely don't lose hope

Statistics: Posted by Annie42 — Mon May 20, 2024 9:29 pm



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