I guess I should be happy

[Shari]

that we made it this far without a complete refusal to do work. But, today was our first (and I suspect far from last) complete refusal to do any work at school.

So they sent it home.

Ugh.

My fear is that the honeymoon is over and he's revealing his true self at school.

I need warrior mom vibes. 12 more years of this....I've already done 13.

Update - he fell asleep. Hard, like usual, he's out. Hasn't had supper cause I spent all the time trying to help him. Ugh. That will make for a great morning.

 

[tammyjh]

Sending many warrior vibes your way ~~~~~
Hoping that you'll be surprised with another good run of days without complete refusals again.

 

[Wiped Out]

Adding more warrior vibes! I hope he is back on track soon. Hugs.

 

[busywend]

If you are having homework wars already, I would put a stop to this immediately. If he can not finish in class, they need to figure out how to get his class work done at school. It is hard enough to try to get regular amounts of homework done if you are in homework battles already.

I do not envy you those 13 years. I can not even imagine going through those years again.

 

[JJJ]

I don't fight the homework wars. My children are generally assigned teachers that do not give a lot of homework because it is in their IEPs that I will provide space and time to do homework but I will not teach anything the teacher's failed to teach in school and I will not do the homework. I've had teacher's tell me that then they get a zero, I simply refer them to the IEP that says no penalty for undone homework. Prior to getting that into the IEP, I simply said "fine". Grade school grades are irrelevant, especially for kiddos like ours. Eeyore started out with Ds and Fs and complete homework refusal. Now in 5th grade, he has almost straight As (that darn B in science!) and he does his homework independently almost every night (less than 1 missing assignment per month!). It became his responsibility and his choice.

 

[Shari]

Well, I was wrong about the morning. It went smooth as glass. He woke up, finished his work, ate some oatmeal, got dressed for school, and we left. Half hour late, but I didn't push. He recognized that he didn't get time to play and he didnt have supper.

The new evaluation is tomorrow so I don't guess I'm going to make a big deal of it until I get those results back.

 

[SRL]

Shari, my difficult child did all of his homework in the morning for several years. He's shot after a full day of school and what would take forever that same day he could mop up quickly the next morning. Now that he's in 5th grade and has up to 4 subjects of homework he will split it up between bedtime and morning.

 

[Christy]

Everyday is a new day. Let's hope this one is better. If the problem persists, work with the school on prioritizing the work that needs done. It is unrealistic to expect that you can get him to do all of his work at home when they have not had success doing it all day in school.

Weed out anything that is "busy work" and focus on what is important. While the best case senario is for difficult child to do all the work as assigned and independently, it may be just as effective to his education to modify some assignments. Can he answer questions verbally rather that by writting them (answers can be dictated). If he refuses to read and something is read to him, he would still get the benefit of hearing the material. Can he do 10 instead of 25 math problems, etc... Some folks hesitate to cut a kid some slack because it's not "fair" but all you can do is all you can do and some work is better than none!

Wishing you a good day!
Christy