You go through the paper together afterwards and it's the same conversation every time. Oh. I meant to write 24. Oh, I read it as adding. Oh, I did the whole thing right and then put the wrong one down.
Your child can do these questions. You know they can, because they've just done three of them correctly in front of you, unprompted, in about forty seconds. And yet six marks are gone.
The word that gets reached for here is 'careless', and I'd gently push back on it. Careless implies your child wasn't trying, which is almost never what's happening. Something specific is going wrong between knowing the answer and getting the mark written down — and it's usually fixable, but only once you know exactly what's going on.
Why does my child make silly mistakes when practising?
Because knowing how to do a question and reliably converting that into a mark are two different skills, and only one of them gets practised on a worksheet.
Here's what makes this frustrating rather than just disappointing: these errors can be close to invisible during practice. A child who is quietly misreading one question in eight looks completely fine at the kitchen table, because you're sitting next to them and you catch it. In the exam hall nobody catches it.
There are four common causes, and they need genuinely different responses.
Four reasons children drop marks they shouldn't
1. They answered a different question
Not the one on the paper. A very slightly different one, which they answered perfectly.
A shop sells pencils in packs of 6. Priya buys 5 packs. She gives 8 pencils to her brother. How many more pencils does Priya have than her brother?
The common wrong answer is 22 — how many Priya has left. Every calculation correct, and the word doing the damage is more.
This is by far the most common cause, and it clusters around a small number of predictable traps: units that change halfway through, 'how many more' rather than 'how many', questions containing a 'not' or an 'except', and anything asking for a total when your child has just carefully worked out one part.
The maths is right and the reading was slightly wrong. Because your child did produce an answer, and it was a sensible-looking number, nothing felt wrong at the time.
The tell: the answer is a real quantity from the question, and it's one they had to do correct work to reach.
What might help
Ask them to underline what the question is actually asking for before they start — not the whole question, just the bit that says what to hand back. Naturally, pay extra attention to bold text.
It sounds trivial, and it is trivial, which is why it works: it costs about two seconds and forces one deliberate moment of attention on precisely the part that's going wrong.
If this happens mostly on longer, story-style questions rather than short ones, the underlying issue may be translating the question rather than reading it carelessly, which is related but distinct.
2. They're holding too much in their head
Ask a ten-year-old to do a three-step question and they will very often try to do all three steps mentally, because writing things down feels slow and maybe even a bit babyish.
It isn't slow. But it does mean step two has to be remembered while step three is being calculated, and working memory at that age, under pressure, isn't built for it. The error then surfaces in the final answer, which makes it look like a maths mistake — when actually every individual piece of maths was correct and one of them simply fell out of their head on the journey.
The tell: they can talk you through the method perfectly but can't reproduce the answer.
What might help
Give a narrow rule rather than a general one: write down any number you'll need again later. Not full workings, not method, just the intermediate answers.
Even just these numbers can also be used to help check answers later down the line.
This one also has a useful side effect — when a question does go wrong, you can see where it went wrong, which can be used to make the next few weeks of practice far more targeted.
3. The answer was right and the transfer was wrong
The working is correct, the number at the bottom is correct, and the final answer that ends up in the answer box isn't that number.
On multiple-choice papers, this often comes up by selecting the option matching an intermediate step — because the people writing these papers know exactly which wrong answer your child is most likely to have produced along the way, and they put it in the options deliberately.
The tell: the paper's working is right almost everywhere, and the losses look random rather than clustered on a topic.
What might help
Two habits, both about a second each. First, glance back at the question number before writing in any box. This will prevent the agonising mistake of putting the answer in the wrong question's box (which then often cascades into even more errors).
Second, after choosing a multiple-choice option, re-read what was asked and check the answer is that kind of thing. If the question wants a number of children but the proposed answer is 4.5, something has gone wrong upstream.
It's also worth telling your child outright that the wrong options are engineered rather than random. 'These were designed to look right to you specifically' can be oddly motivating for a ten-year-old; no one likes to be tricked!
4. They're rushing because they're frightened of the clock
A child told repeatedly that time is tight will start optimising for speed over accuracy, because that is what they've been asked to do. The result is a paper finished with four minutes to spare and five marks dropped on questions they could have done comfortably — which is usually a worse outcome than not finishing.
The tell: untimed accuracy is fine and timed accuracy isn't, on the same kind of question.
What might help
Be careful about the framing. If running out of time is a genuine problem for your child then it does need addressing. Importantly, the fix isn't more pressure to 'just go faster'.
My guess is that a fair number of children get accidentally trained into this by well-meaning timed practice, and that it unwinds fairly quickly once the framing changes.
How to work out which one it is
Take a marked paper where they've dropped marks that surprised you. The next day — not the same day — go through only the wrong ones. Don't tell them what they got wrong or why. Hand each question back, untimed, and watch.
They'll fall into four groups, and the groups are the diagnosis.
Reading the pattern
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Right immediately, unprompted. No knowledge gap at all. This is cause 1, 2 or 3 — watch whether they write anything down as they work, or ask them to explain their method, to determine the root cause.
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Right the moment you read the question aloud. Almost certainly cause 1. They can do the maths; the question just didn't land the first time.
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Right, but slowly and with visible effort. Look at the original answer. If it was close, this is likely cause 2 — the method is there but too expensive to hold together at pace.
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Still can't do it. Not a silly mistake at all, but a genuine gap, and it needs teaching rather than technique.
A quicker version, if you only have the marked paper: for each wrong answer, ask whether the working was right. A paper where the working is sound and the final answers aren't is a very different paper from one where the working itself breaks down, and it points you at completely different fixes.
None of this is exact, and one paper is a small sample — children have off days, and a single unusually hard question can distort the picture. But it's more actionable than 'concentrate harder', which is the advice children often get and which has never really worked on anybody.
What we do about it
The awkward thing about accuracy is that it needs volume. You can't fix a one-in-eight misreading rate across four practice papers — you need enough questions for the habit to become automatic, and no child wants to do that many questions at a kitchen table.
That's much of what we've built 11+ Heroes around. Our Expeditions break practice into short, frequent, low-stakes bursts, which is the format that actually builds automatic habits, and children do far more of them than they would on a worksheet because of our in-game rewards. Our Summits (mini mock exams) then put those habits under real exam conditions, which is where you find out whether they hold.
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