In our previous blog, we discussed how the new curriculum removed levels and replaced them with age-related expectations (AREs), and how these could be shared through your child’s school report.
It’s not just school reports where it’s useful to understand AREs. When meeting with your child’s class teacher, it’s great to have an understanding of what is expected from your child. At parent-teacher conferences or parents’ evenings, you may have conversations with your child’s teacher or see targets in their books which are different to what you’re used to seeing.
As a parent, you want to know how you can best support your child, and we want to help make things easier for you. That’s why we designed DoodleMaths and DoodleEnglish to help you quickly and easily identify where your child’s strengths and weaknesses are.
DoodleConnect
DoodleConnect is a free app which lets you track your child’s progress. Whether you use DoodleMaths or DoodleEnglish, our programmes are working hard to find the gaps in your child’s understanding. This is then shown to you in DoodleConnect.
We think it’s vital that you know how your child is getting on with their learning. It means it’s much less of a surprise if your child’s teacher tells you that they need much more support in a particular area, or that with a little more support they could be working at greater depth. Having this knowledge enables you to have conducive conversations with your child’s teacher throughout the year.
By identifying your child’s weaknesses, DoodleConnect enables you to support your child in areas they are finding more challenging. However, teaching methods have changed dramatically over the past few years.
We often hear of parents who have tried to help their children using strategies they were taught at school which are no longer used in the classroom. Mr. Incredible illustrates this problem perfectly:
Most schools have a ‘calculation policy’ on their website (just do a quick internet search for your child’s school name and ‘calculation policy’) for you to download. This outlines how maths topics are currently being taught in your child’s school.
The Parent Dashboard
You can also use the Parent Dashboard to view Gaps, which provides a more in-depth look at your child’s strengths and weaknesses.
You can also use this feature to assign work in particular areas. Extras are 15 question lessons which you can select from our database: while our programmes constantly address areas of weakness, we know that sometimes your child may want to revise specific content.