MON, it's great to hear that your ds is doing well in middle school! Doesn't it feel wonderful?
But, he will come home and say he has just a little homework and be at it for 3 hours! Not all the time, but often enough. When he has a lot of homework, he is actually more efficient. When he has an incentive, he is faster, but tends to forget that he has homework in a certain subject. Add an extracurricular in there and he is stressed by the time constraints- though surprisingly efficient at completing his homework when he has returned from the EC.
Incentives don't speed up our ds - he's slow whether or not there's an incentive. Knowing he has extracurriculars that he might not be able to fit in stresses him out but he's getting good about knowing what he can and can't fit in and making decisions about when to not go to the extracurricular or planning his homework out in advance to fit in the extracurricular. He's just in a place where the homework seems to be taking up far more time than his teachers intend it to take. I think his work speed is slow in school too.
Unfortunately most of his ECs are at night, not after school. When he comes home he's usually ready to fall asleep from being exhausted rather than being energized! I think if it was reversed and he could do his ECs immediately after school, come home and have dinner, he might have an extra perk of energy going into homework time which might help. I've also found a little bit of quick-burning carbs/sugar helps just a bit when he's really really moving at a snail's pace. Not the healthiest accommodation, but otoh it doesn't take much.
Observations:
1. His binder is disorganized and he can't read his agenda book, doesn't always record his homework in his NEO, and checks teacher's websites. So, he has 3 areas to check to see if he has homework and to figure out what it is. Not the most efficient.
2. He gets distracted by organizing himself.
3. He gets distracted by telling me about organizing himself.
We're still working on organization - I'll admit to micro-managing it both for ds' sanity and for my sanity
We've made good progress and ds is slowly getting the hang of it, but there are still moments (usually at least once a week, if not once per day lol) where we'll think we have everything under control and he'll suddenly remember "Oh! I have homework in ___ " or he'll forget to bring something home or forget to take something to school. I think the organization skills are all a long work in progress - as it all is.
polarbear
