For children at the start of their schooling, knowing how to support their stages of development and understanding what to expect from your child in terms of where they are at and where you may worry they should be can put added pressure on both you and your child.

 Every child learns at different rates and even the best teachers in the world cannot make a child do something they are not cognitively ready to do. When working with your child at home it's important to get a gauge on what they can do all by themselves and then know what the next step is to encourage and support them towards. The resources on this page are here to help you understand where your child is on the continuum of skill development and provide some ideas of how to move them on. Once back at school your teacher will be able to offer more personalised support and feedback on how they are progressing using our Linc-Ed  tool. 

Children are just like adults when it comes to success...when they feel like they are doing well, they do even better. When they feel, or are told they are doing things wrong 99% of the time it serves to demotivate children and is counter-productive to what is trying to be achieved. Giving feedback to children about their work is really important, but so is how we give it to them. 

A simple model you can use in your home when talking to your child about their work is the Two Stars and a Wish model. In this model you tell the child two things you think they have done really well and one thing you think would make their work even better next time. When they come back to their work the next day, you can remind them of what they did well the day before and revisit your wish from the previous day and discuss how they might be able to make that wish come true in their work today.  

An example may be- 

Star 1: I see you worked really hard to hear lots of the letters in this tricky word.

 Star 2: It really helps me as  your reader understand your story when you match your pictures to the words you have used. 

Wish: Tomorrow when you write your story, I would love to see you put a space between each of your words so it makes it really easy for me to read. 

You can use this model for feedback in any curriculum area.