Friday, October 16, 2009

Homework Woes

J just won't do his homework. He doesn't like to write! His homework assignments are given on Monday and due on Friday. He has 4 days to work on it, but he says it's too much, that he's too tired. His gets to choose between two assignment options. One option is usually a story prompt. He draws a picture and writes a few sentences about it. The other option is usually to draw as many things as he can think of that start with the letter of the week and label them.

I let him choose what he wants to do, then he happily brainstorms with me and draws his picture. Then he tells me what he wants to write and I write it neatly for him to copy on the back of his picture.

Last night, after 2 hours of him sitting in his chair and doing who knows what (I did not sit there with him the whole time), I gave up. He would only write when I verbally told him the letters to write, even though it was all in front of him. He would NOT write anything if I didn't feed it to him letter by letter. He says he's too tired. Which is, of course, his excuse any time I ask him to do anything. He could be running around like a maniac one second, then flop on the floor and claim he's too tired to do anything if I ask him to pick up some socks! Argh!

So, thinking of the Love and Logic book I read a while ago, I decided to let him experience the consequence of not having his homework ready when it was due. I discussed consequences with him and asked him what the consequence would be if he didn't have his homework done. He decided he didn't care. So I dropped it.

He has afternoon kindergarten, and in the morning, he started to panic a little bit that his homework wasn't done. He started to write, again demanding that I feed him letter by letter. I was proud of his motivation, although he was still rather slow. He grabbed his lap desk and continued to write in the car on the drive to school. Even so, he barely got through 1/2 of what he'd agreed to write when the bell rang to go to class. I was proud of myself for letting him go with it half-done (and messy at that) and couldn't wait to hear what his teacher said about it.

Guess what she did? Nothing. Worse than nothing, actually. She picked today to start handing the homework back, complete with a sticker and "awesome story!" written on it. Yes, it was an awesome story, but he didn't write any of it. So how would she know how awesome it was? He basically only restated the question, plus about 5 more words.

So much for letting him experience the consequences.

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