Reply to How is your early reader doing now?

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "How is your early reader doing now?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DS1 was reading at a 3rd grade level by K.  In 2nd grade his teacher was giving him 5th grade spelling words.  We never pushed it.  It was like a code he was trying to crack...and he was so proud of himself for it.

As a 7th grader, he's a pretty average student.  He's very bright, but he's found that he's smart enough to not have to study in order to do well on tests, so he wont study.  He hates homework, so his grades suffer there as well.

Beware of burning your kids out at such a young age.  It could back fire on you, even if it's just the teachers pushing and not the parents.[/quote]

The last thing you wrote is what I'm afraid of.  How do you wish it were handled differently?[/quote]

When my DS1 entered into K, they were introducing a new program called "steps to literacy".   The K teachers started assigning homework every night.....it could last over an hour each night.  I was floored!!!  DS just wanted to be a kid and play.  And I don't blame him.  So the battles started at a very young age to do the homework.

1st grade wasn't much better.  By 3rd grade, his teacher assigned 4 essays, 4 speeches, and multiple projects to be worked on at home during the year.  Truly, it was insane.  After that, I started requesting teachers that typically don't assign too much work because I could see the pattern was not going to change unless I stepped in.  Now that he is in 7th grade, he's one of the brightest kids in his "grade level" classes.  The only reason he isn't recommended for honors is because of the amount of homework associated with those classes.

I've decided that if you push, your kids will ultimately fail.  If your child LIKES school or doing homework, that's a different scenario all together.  Granted, what elementary school kid likes homework, right?  Well, by 5th grade, I think you can get a good idea of who is going to be an honors student and who just wants to do the minimum work required to get through.  Like most parents, we pushed in the beginning for him to do all the work assigned of him.  It was torture for him, and torture for us.  Our family life has suffered because of this.

On the flip side, DD started school 2 years later and for some reason, she has skated through the system with little homework.  It's my theory that because she wasn't slammed with it so early on, she isn't so burned out....and she doesn't have such an attitude towards it.

My 3rd child is moderately autistic.  If they ever tried to assign hw, I'd laugh in their faces and just say "no fucking way".

I regret that I pushed my child at such a young age.  It backfired.  He's a very smart kid, but he'll have to do it the tough way now.  I can only hope that he finds some drive inside himself for college one day.  If I were a stronger person, I would have nipped it in the bud at elem school and told the school that my child would not be doing homework.  I would have waited until middle school to expect any outside work.  at least for us, this was the case.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics