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Location: UK
Joined: Jun 2008
Posts: 43
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Advice please any 2ndry school teachers or parents of this age group
Hi all, well me and hubby find ourselves in a tricky situation and would like the dogsey advice.
Me and Hubby move around the country a lot (main reason we can't have any pets right now
) so we find we aren't that close with our families. We have 4 neices and one of them just started secondary school last week. She says she's enjoying it but hasn't made any friends yet. Last Friday we rang to say we'd like to spend some time with her on Saturday as we were around. She was excited to spend time with us so we asked that she complete one of her 2 pieces of homework before Saturday afternoon when we'd drop by and pick her up. Saturday 1pm came and we were there collecting her for a day of baking fairy cakes and art stuff. She brought her homework with her to show us that she'd completed both pieces set! We were well chuffed until we saw her efforts.
One piece "Citizenship" was for her to draw pictures to illustrate what each word was for, such as "bullying ... racism ... puberty" it was a A3 sheet folded into A6 with dirty marks on the back. The pictures were all similar if not the same and her colouring-in of the words was incredibly scruffy.
The second piece was "Geography" and she was to select a photo from newspapers, magazines or the internet which was an example of geography and describe what was in the photo and how it illustrated geography. What she had done was glue a newspaper photo onto a A4 piece of paper and surround it with sloppy writing - not even straight lines. The writing was a direct copy of the newspaper text about flooding in Binar, Guinea, West Africa. But she hadn't even spelt all the words correctly. Also when we asked her about what the story was about or what some of the words meant she simply shrugged and attempted to distract us.
Now I was pleased she had done the homework and praised her for being so effiecent in completing her homework. However we both know that she can do better, and felt uncertain if we should've taken a different approach. Should we have made her re-do her homework, should we have let her know that we felt it was substandard? Are we expecting too much? How would the schools deal with this? Do you have any suggestions on how we can encourage or motivate her to try harder?
Furthermore I watched "Dispatches: last chance kids" and realised that she doesn't have the reading ability of an eleven year old, her level is more of the 7-9year olds. Could this be why she fails to try?
.... just grabbing at straws now ... thing is we feel more could be done to achieve .... we feel her parents aren't in the right frame of mind to be able to help encourage her .... should the school be expected to do more .... Is there a roll for us in helping her apply herself more?
Ah so many questions, its difficult to know where to start.
Any thought???
L.