How to check whether your child's basics are weak

When a child does badly in a subject, the usual explanation is that the child is careless or slow. Often that is not the reason. The child missed something in an earlier class, and every new chapter needs it. Here are four checks you can do at home in about twenty minutes. Do them casually, not as a test.

Look at the working, not the marks

Marks tell you how big the problem is, not where it is. Take the last test paper and read the wrong answers line by line. Usually either the method was right and the calculation went wrong, or the wrong method was used. These need different help.

Check 1: Ask your child to read a page aloud

Give your child a page from a school book they have not read before, and ask them to read it aloud. Then ask what the page was about.

If the reading comes out in smooth phrases, it is fine. If your child reads one word at a time, correctly but flatly, all their effort is going into the words, and they will not be able to tell you what the page said. This is a reading problem, and it affects every subject, including maths word problems.

Check 2: Ask a multiplication fact out of order

Ask 7 times 8. Then 15 minus 8. Then 36 divided by 6. Ask while walking or at dinner, not at the study table.

If the answer comes in a second, the fact is learnt. If it comes after a pause and some counting, your child is working it out every time. That slows down every sum and makes long questions harder. Reciting tables in order does not fix this. Practise them out of order.

Check 3: Cover the solved example

Open the textbook at an exercise, cover the solved example at the top of the page, and ask your child to do the first question.

A child who understands the method starts writing, even if the answer turns out wrong. A child who has been copying looks at the covered example, then at you, and waits. The method was never learnt, only copied.

Check 4: Time one page of homework

If a page that should take fifteen minutes takes fifty, each step is being worked out from the beginning. Slow but correct work is fine. Slow work with half the answers wrong means the basics are not there yet.

What is not a problem

One difficult chapter is not a problem. Fractions, long division and tenses are hard for many children for a few weeks. A bad month after an illness or a change of school is not a problem either. The basics are weak when the difficulty has lasted more than a term, shows up in old topics and not only in the new chapter, and gets worse as the year goes on.

What to do if the basics are weak

Do not add more practice on the current chapter. That is where most families start, and it does not help, because the current chapter is not the problem.

Go back to the last thing your child could do confidently and work forward from there. Twenty minutes a day on the missing skill for six weeks does more than two hours a night on the current chapter.

Tell your child plainly that they missed one skill, and that it can be learnt. Most children who are behind think they are not clever. Hearing that it is one missing skill, and not them, helps.