Homework
Just a little background on where I'm coming from with this problem. My Ex was a homeschooler for religious reasons and was very poor at doing it. The solution to get a child to do school work was to scream at the to "focus." I don't handle someone screaming at a child as a solution to making better grades or to even doing homework.
Now, years later (my kids are now in a normal school) I met my fiance who now lives with me along with her 11 year old son. My kids and her child have no conflict issues and its been close to a year so I am grateful for that.
My kids have an interest in school and do well. Her son could care less and until I started working with him he made poor grades. The solution before I began was to yell and make threats that were later discarded. The problem with this method is the grades don't improve. I also told her if she were to yell at him for grades that she would need to go for a drive to do it because I have a zero tolerance policy due to my past.
Here's my problem. This child is wearing me out with his homework. I think he may have just gotten by for so long without having to apply himself that he thinks he can wear me down. Here is an example. I make him get a 50% on spelling on Monday, 60% on Tuesday, 70% on Wednesday, and a 80% on Thursday. Last Thursday school let out at noon. I was doing spelling with him until 5:30. I'd had it, it was the first nice day we had had for a while and I wanted to paint my boat that afternoon. But no I'm working with someone else's kid to make sure he can get decent grades.
The child is smart and very creative. I'm starting to wonder if maybe he is just lazy because I've noticed he is slack with chores as well. He likes to allocate blame for why he cannot perform his tasks (which at 11 the blame has little logic to it).
He's working on a page of fractions now which he has been for almost 2 hours. I've gone over the concepts with him over and over. I finally sent him to his room until his mother gets home. The problem is this situation is causing tension in our home an average of three nights a week.
My mother and sister have told me to stop doing what I am doing but I refuse to eventually have a 16 yr old flunking out of high school living in my home. My fiance has a hard job and I want to help her out. I don't mind what I am doing but I need to somehow get this child to step up to the plate.
I can keep this up for a long time in its current form but I'm getting resentful.
new math and spelling
Our schools have the new math. They have a math night for parents once or twice a year to help parents understand it. As for spelling, a good friend of mine whose son was struggling with spelling, tried this method and it worked well for them. Each word the child could not spell they had to write X number of times to "practice". Spelling was sort of hard for me too. The way I learned the best was to sound out the word and say it how its spelled - for example - different - I would say diff er ent and then I could spell it. I hope I explained that one so you get it. I tried to teach my kids this way of spelling but I guess I am the only one who gets it or cares to in my house.
My 10yo son is the same way.
But we recently discovered that he's been suffering from insomnia for most of this school year. He's a worrier, but not a complainer, so things just build up inside him until he's like a sponge that cannot absorb another drop. After ruling just about everything else out, we finally figured out that - duh! - he's not getting enough sleep because he can't turn his thoughts off at night. He'll take HOURS to do a math worksheet that should take him twenty or thirty minutes, tops. He has a hard time focusing, but is not hyper or anything like that. No ADHD. He's just tired and when he's tired, he can't concentrate. So we're doing some things to help him get more and better sleep at night. It's only been a week, but I'm seeing him more alert during homework time, at least, and he doesn't seem quite as temperamental as before. Is your fiance's son getting enough deep, restful sleep at night?
♥ Georgia, the un-stepmom ♥
"Good men don't just happen. They have to be created by us women." (from ROSEANNE)