does your child find bonds hard?

[dunemigrating]

We've just started Bonds Third Maths book and my son seems to find a lot of it hard. He very quickly looks at a question and says 'I can't do it'. Yet when I go through the answer with him, I THINK he understands it. I don't know if he's being lazy or if he really can't do it. Any suggestions please?

[anowicka]

I had the same issue with my DD. She struggled with the book as well at the beginning , very similar to your DS . As we are nearly finish this one I can see a difference now. She improved a lot. Just go with your son through it and explain questions he doesn’t understand and I am sure he will improve , I think it’s just a practice.
How old is your son?

[scarlett]

I think it is just practice too.My son who has just passed the 11 plus and my year 4 son who is doing a bit of Bonds maths both went through the same thing !! I think some of it is due to the fact the questions are word problems so, there is understanding the question before they can start on the maths which is just too much sometimes !! Just do little and often and you might just have to explain the question first before they can do it.They do get there in the end !

[mystery]

I have no personal experience of this problem but I once remember a tutor saying that a good thing that you could do, in addition to actually practising papers, is to sit with your child somewhere comfy e.g. on the sofa, in bed etc, and look at questions without the intention of actually doing them. Instead get your child to describe to you the method they would use to do the question, but don't get them to actually do it. Maybe you could use this technique a bit with the bond books your child finds diffficult to remove the fear, and also to focus the child on thinking about the meaning of the question and the method without getting bogged down in the actual computations. If your child can use a calculator well, maybe sometimes you could let them use a calculator as well?

[moved]

Bond are very compact. Perhaps choose a few questions that he likes and go through those. If Bond 3 are too hard he could do Bond 2 first and get used to the style of the papers with easy questions.

[dani*]

It may be a good idea to go down a level for the time being. Confidence is often half the battle. Once children get used to the style of questions things get easier. When we started out we would mix and match. We used the easier Bond Books as a warm up (which she did on her own) and looked at some of the harder ones together after that. She soon got the confidence to tackle the harder questions on her own.

[dunemigrating]

Thank you for all the useful posts. I will definitely try the suggestions. The general feeling I got from your posts was that it is practice, practice, practice. We did do the Bonds two book twice over just to get his confidence up, but he has told me he finds the third one much harder. It is usually the wordy ones he struggles with, but I guess we will just persevere. I will try approaching it differently by asking him what method he would use. Perhaps he may feel differently at the end of the book. Once again thanks for the help.

[moved]

If you have already done Bond 2 then pick out questions and do not do whole papers. Pick out a few from each paper and just do those initially so that a whole paper can be done in chunks.

[anowicka]

We also did the book two and she found it ok. Then we switched to the third one and my DD found it difficult, much harder. Now we are on the test 17 and I can really see a difference. Do not worry, just go through the book and explain the stuffs he doesn't understand . This is what I have been doing with my DD and she is doing much better now than at the beginning .

[dani*]

We used to do one page a time this time last year. Little and often makes it less of an uphill struggle. Also always end on a positive note.