Don’t do these 3 things if you are preparing for the 4+ at top, elite schools.
/If you want to have true success in your child’s 4+ assessments you will avoid doing these three things.
Starting late
Anything less than 1 full year is starting late.
Can you still have success in your child’s 4+ assessments? Of course you can. But you are taking a massive risk. You see, it will all depend on where your child is academically and behaviourally at the point of starting. If you are starting from scratch (as most parents are when they start working with us), then starting late will be very risky. If you’re willing to take that risk, do so. If you’re not, start with at least 12 months of assessment preparation time.
2. Believe that the nursery or pre-prep alone will prepare your child for their 4+ assessments.
Believe me - They will not be the ones responsible for your child’s success.
I’ve worked with a handful of parents who send their children to ultra pricey pre-preps who have worked with me for 1-3 months and then quickly given up. As in abruptly made the decision to stop working with me. They rarely share their real reasons with me so I can’t comment on their reasons but I can of course speculate and imagine why!
You see these clients pay 10-15k per term to send their children to these top pre-preps. So why should they spend an additional 1k per term to prepare their children at home?
3. Expect learning to be linear.
When we first start working with some of our clients, they have this irrational belief that learning is linear. That their child will ‘just get it’. It’s so easy after all? Well, to you it is! To 2 and 3 year olds it won’t be. What you need to expect is for learning to be bumpy. It will be up and down.
It will have twists and turns. Your child will get something instantly and will not get something else so quickly. Your child will love certain areas of learning and they will not like others.
Nothing has gone wrong. As soon as you make it mean that something has gone wrong, guess what will happen? You will just give up. You will say to yourself things like ‘Well what’s even the point?’ ‘Why am I bothering?’ ‘He will just get it nearer the time of the assessment!’ (that’s a sneaky thought which is a complete lie by the way).
Learning is never linear. Even when your child does go to school, do not expect learning to be linear. Do not expect for your child to just make progress in a linear manner. They will not. And expecting them to will just lead to disappointment and comparison to others who you just assume ‘get it!’ but that is most certainly never the case.
Our most successful clients are the clients who know that learning will not follow a linear pattern. Our most successful clients are the clients who don’t get discouraged when their children do not learn their phonics as quickly as they expect that they should. Our most successful clients are the ones who know that it might take their child a long, long time to recognise numbers and even when they don’t recognise numbers, they will relentlessly continue to show them. Our most successful clients are the clients who continue to ask their children a variety of different questions even though their children don’t answer in the manner that they would like them to. Our most successful clients are the ones who are willing to be disappointed and know that success will only come to them if they carry on and persevere.
