How to iron out silly mistakes?

[diseyp]

You cannot iron out silly mistakes - they are part of being a kid ...

[southbucks3]

I always knew I was young at heart.

[berks_mum]

How many tests are you doing per week? I guess boredom is kicking in leading to silly mistakes.

If its the place I'm thinking of then the workload is massive, I'd be very tempted to fill in the answers yourselves and stick to one or two tests a week. Its too much!

I honestly don't think we are doing too many tests at the moment. I think we have just started and she takes them very lightly hence the lack of concentration.

Wonder if children inherit parents' 'laid back' attitude (hope OH is not reading this post).

[fairyelephant]

In maths I would tell my DC to underline key things in the question, such as the unit of measurement or the format of the answer (fraction/percentage) etc. that way they can glance back when they've finished the question to see that at least they have answered in the right format. When checking they should do a sense check - does my answer make sense? dS in particular would rush the "easier" questions at the beginning making far more errors than in complex questions. I just showed him how much his percentage score would go up if he was more careful and that this could be the difference, it made a huge impact. Have to admit this all happened at the last moment when he had been preparing for sometime and was keen for it all not to be in vain.

[Ladygala]

So glad I found this thread- my dd I'd making silly mistakes all the time and no matter how much I explain to her that she must check her working out, and every mark counts etc etc, we're still not ironing many out. I discussed this with her tutor a few months ago, and she told me that silly mistakes are unforgivable! I was distraught and thought that there was no hope for us. Needless to say, we have stopped going to that tutor and I am diying! Thanks everyone for making me and my child feel normal!

[Rosy Pippin]

Not sure if this worked for us on the day or not (awaiting results) but every time DD completed a past paper we worked out where she lost marks and put them in categories like "attention to detail" or "stuff to learn" or "stuff to improve". I unthinkingly said the words "silly mistake" in the early days and she was very hurt and rightly gave me the speech about time pressure (walk a mile in my flip flops mum) so we swapped to attention to detail as a more positive spin. Then we'd work out what her mark would have been if there were no attention to detail mistakes. That seemed to do the trick and gradually the number lessened and the overall mark went up. Not saying that there were no unforced errors in the final reckoning but hopefully much fewer...good luck

[parent2013]

You cannot iron out silly mistakes - they are part of being a kid ...

You can iron out silly mistakes. It easily takes 4-6 months but the techniques don't come for free I am afraid.

[nmababy]

I am glad to hear that I am not alone in this 'silly mistakes' issue. I always get annoyed when my DD gets simple questions wrong. I keep reminding her that every mark matters alot and not to waste it. It's useful reading all the suggestions on this forum, I will try them all out and see which one works...

[fatbananas]

You cannot iron out silly mistakes - they are part of being a kid ...

You can iron out silly mistakes. It easily takes 4-6 months but the techniques don't come for free I am afraid.

What does that mean, Parent2013?

[TwoDownTwoToGo]

My daughter was making 'silly mistakes'. I would remind her at the start of each test:

1) Be careful,
2) Try to stay focussed,
3) Check over her work,

Without fail, there were still 'silly mistakes'!

The mistakes were usually simple numerical errors eg not multiplying out correctly, or adding up incorrectly etc

My daughter was happy for me to accept that it was a mistake and not something deeper..... but....

The mistakes still kept on happening.

Eventually I realised that what I was calling silly mistakes were not really 'mistakes'.

The fact that my daughter was able add or subtract fractions, or solve a complex wordy problem meant that there was no way we would ever imagine that addig up a string of single digit numbers would be a problem.

However, I decided to go back to basics. We practiced lots of simple additions, subtractions multiplication and division problems. As reluctant as my daughter was, I insisted on this exercise. somewhere in this simplistic process, gaps were filled.

Thereafter, the 'silly mistakes' seemed to have reduced greatly.