Her class has started 'speed sheets' every Friday, twenty sums in two minutes. At home, with no timer, she gets them all. In class last week she wrote four answers and cried in the van. The teacher says it builds fluency. Fine. Right now it's building panic. Do we practise with a timer at home so it feels normal, or does that just turn every day into Friday? 🤷
Our younger one had the same in class 2. Practising with a timer made it worse for him. What helped was turning it into a race against me, where I deliberately lost about half the time. By class 3 he no longer cared about the timer, though I can't tell whether that was the game or just getting older.
we played shop with real coins and she had to give change quickly or the 'customer' walked off. same skill, no paper. she still hates speed sheets but she finishes them now
Ask the teacher what happens to the scores. In our son's class it turned out nobody was graded on them, they were only for each child to beat their own number. Once he knew that, Fridays got easier.
My grandson does his practice sheets at my place after school. We race the pressure cooker: whoever finishes before the third whistle chooses the evening snack 😄 Silly, but he finishes now, and the Friday sheets have stopped being a topic.
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