Thank you all! I was speaking with my mom this morning and she reminded me that some of this may be anxiety left over from last school year. He was doing the next year's math book, mainly with us at night, after his regular homework (yes, after things like two plus two) and there were some epic struggles, sometimes because he didn't want to do it, sometimes because frankly, the directions stunk and sometimes because his writing was poor and we or the teacher made him redo things we couldn't read. (Nice run-on sentence, eh?)
I love the methodology of breaking the problems down, too! He doesn't struggle with figure out word problems (yet), but it would give him a way to structure his work.
On the plus side, he did do the "extra or formerly too hard" page without being asked to do so by us. Unfortunately, he didn't fully follow the directions and so, we had another crying fest this morning when we reminded him he had to finish the work.
It seems like he should be happier about doing math work. Ugh!
