Blackcat, I can't remember if your DD is in a regular of gifted class, so my first question is, how much of the unfinished work is important for her to do, and how much is busywork? We were in a similar situation as you with DS up grade 5, where absolutely nothing came home, ever, and we had no ability to try and scaffold writing or executive function, no matter how many times and ways we asked to try and work on these issues together with the school.
Now we are suddenly in a brutal situation where DS has hit middle school while simultaneously switching to a gifted class with a massive workload, mostly writing (and mostly in social sciences areas where he struggles even more than usual because of his total lack of interest/ ability to engage in the topics). For his entire elementary school career, he was not finishing large quantities of work (fun combo of writing disability, slow processing, ADHD-inattentive and anxiety), and his teachers were shrugging it off, since they knew he didn't need the practice, and they knew how hard writing was for him. This year, we are seeing disaster result from DS's total inability to understand that work given to him must actually be finished. And that work not completed in class must be brought home, completed, and submitted next day. DS honestly figured anything worked on in class was class work - and if they class moved on to something else next day, then he didn't need to worry about it any more. With the best of intentions, his teachers have created deeply ingrained bad habits that combine with his glacial writing and total lack of executive function to make his life now stunningly difficult.
Long way to say - our experience has been that it's a very, very bad thing when teachers shrug off unfinished work. Some day, that suddenly won't be OK anymore, and the child is left with no clue what the new rules are and when they apply - what they are supposed to be doing, when, where and how. Throw in the ADHD that causes our DS to miss most instruction, and whatever-it-is that makes him even more likely to miss implicit instructions, and toxic soup emerges.
So, what would have helped avoid this? If you have a child who for combo of ability and disability isn't really expected to finish everything, they can really benefit from clearly-defined expectations at the outset. e.g. Here's the worksheet, I've circled the 5 you have to do, and we will make sure these get done. Anything therefore not completed at school will go home, every day. For multi-day projects, the teacher and child will work together to create a schedule/ workplan, and the project will come home regularly to ensure each individual milestone is caught up (and NOT send the whole thing home on the last day to do a month's worth of unfinished work!). I think these are reasonable and IEP-able requirements, and shoot, do I wish we'd had them in place for the last several years.
