Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments What HAS worked for you?

I find that I'm so frequently frustrated by the educational system, that I look at what ISN'T working for DS, and feel like sometimes I'm blinded to what IS working for him. So, here's something that IS working for us.

DS complains about his homework taking too long and being boring so when I can, I try to find ways to make it into a game that is more fun/challenging. Yesterday, for his spelling words, I took several of the words and made them a puzzle for him and his little brother to guess. For example, one word was CHOOSE, so I said this is a verb that starts with the letter "C", it has a homonym that is also a verb and is something you do with a body part above your neck, and the homonym ends with "S" (Answer: CHEWS). Then I gave him examples such as blinks and listens so they'd understand the type of verb I meant. We had a hoot trying to see how long it would take them to figure out the word. He didn't mind then writing the word down several times as was assigned, because he was wondering what the next puzzle would be.

Anyone have anything they'd like to share that works for them? Or accommodations the school has made that have been resourceful and worked well?

Thanks for being here! I love this board!

IIRC I was given a lot of these to work on in class in the 3rd grade in public school when I was "disruptive."

http://edhelper.com/wordfind.htm

I also was given some simpler crossword puzzles.

You might be able to find a puzzle maker that will take all the spelling words for the week and make both the word finder AND a crossword?

Here is a crossword puzzle maker as well as word search puzzle maker. I've used the crossword puzzle maker with a big success.

http://www.puzzle-maker.com/

This is about emotional control, not school issues, but it's still a success that might be useful to someone...

For my DS4's OEs, I now ask him to rate the way he feels on a scale of 1 to 5, where a 1 is "I'm fine" and a 5 is "I will surely die any moment from a broken heart!" Then I have him rate the problem that caused the upset on a scale from 1 to 5. I do this while he's crying, after a meltdown has started. (I know that seems like it would be too late, but it's apparently not.)

It is working like a charm to calm his excessive emotion fast and simply. I suspect the mere act of analyzing his situation distracts him enough to rein his emotions back in, and asking him to compare reality to how he feels about things lets him see the disconnect between the two in a useful way.

He now seems to accept that having a wailing, crying meltdown over where the tongue of his shoe is on his foot is not really appropriate. (That's not to say he has completely stopped crying over it, but he's easy to bring back to calm now!)

That's a BIG step in the right direction!

I confess, I'm pretty proud of myself, because I just thought this up on my own. And it seems to be working amazingly well! Yay me!

I hope it helps someone else!

We use a "do over". I got the idea from ground hog day. If something goes wrong, gets escalated all out of proportion, we start over. Completely forget about the first time and take it from the top.

In the beginning I used to tell my son we were going to have a do over and we'd do just that. Now, when he gets to where he knows that his actions aren't really dictated by what happen but rather are all out of proportion, he'll ask me if he can have a "do over". It has worked really well for us.

Online games that are educational in some way or spark an interest in learning more about a subject.

Sometimes we take a vacation from our normal routine when we are bored or stressed out to go to "Wikipedia Land" as my son calls it. My son chooses something to look up, sometimes just a random Wikipedia article, and we end up following links to see what interesting things we can learn just for fun.

Letting my son, who enjoys video games, to "level up" in his academic skills as far as he wants to go without expecting his physical skills to be at the same level. He gets very bored with something if he is not allowed to level up.

Reading with my son and discussing those "thought provoking books" that he loves.

Taking time to actually look up words that he hasn't heard before so he can learn their exact meaning and etymology instead of just using context clues.

Letting him work on memorizing things like scripts or lyrics or math facts while playing video games (only games that don't require any concentration).

Watching educational shows on history and science channels together and talking about them which usually leads to looking up more info online.

Reading classic books together, discussing each chapter and then going to sparknotes.com to read their analysis to see how it compares to your own.

Wow Lori! You highlighted so many of the reasons that homeschooling keeps calling to me. In the meantime, I'm going to be more conscious of doing these things with my daughters.

I really liked this:

Oh my! THANK YOU!!!! I have run out of ideas, and this one sounds WONDERFUL!!!! DS5 can turn such "trivial" things into such huge things, and while most of the time I am able to calm him and get him to calm down, talk about it, etc, DH has issues. He came from a "speak when you're spoken to" & "go out and get a switch" kind of background, so his reactions to DS's fits can make them worse!

Anyway, thanks again! I'm so going to incorporate this next time (wish I had it tonight. We hadn't had an episode in a few weeks and bam!!!).