Grinity, those are some very good ideas which I wil be sure to borrow.
I'm happy for you to borrow the ideas, but I mostly want you to borrow the
process and bring him into the process, if he is mature enough to be interested. My son is living away at boarding school, and he has been been doing the daily problem solving that I carved into him to create his own solutions for the last 2 years. Recently he was getting out of the car and said, causally, "I make it a policy to always carry a writing impliment." I grinned and grabbed my pen from the 'car pen spot' and held it up in salute.
That's what builds automatisity - good habits. One needs the frame of mind to search for which good habits suit one, and be ready to keep modifying the habits until they work.
DS struggles with his daily routine too. I had dismissed them as laziness before. Everything from getting up on time to getting to the bus stop needs me pushing him. As you suggested I need to get a schedule down and enforce it everyday.
Actually, I am hoping that you will be his consultant, to help him brainstorm a schedule, brainstorm a reward system, and help him monitor if and where it needs tweaking. If he melts down emotionally at this, them perhaps you need to do it for him, but he may be mature enough to find this to be an interesting project, which is why I'm suggesting you find out what bothers HIM the most.
ofcourse as I expected DS choose to write the least amount of words required.There were 3 blank lines for each picture and he hardly filled one line. He does the samething at school.His teacher has to ask him to redo it then he does a good job. I am not sure if its him just being lazy and trying to skate by with the least amount of work. ... but he will still take his own sweet time to sip on his milk or read a book even if its 7:55. I have to yell at him to hurry up. But I have to say he can be quick when he wants to - on field trip day last week he was ready at 7:30 ;-) so I guess he needs motivation.
I wanted to pull these quotes out to show you that he IS being affected by his bottlenecks. If you think he is lazy, unmotivated, skating by, then most teachers are probably thinking the same thing. If you are yelling at him every simgle morning, isn't it likely that he is internalizing a self image of himself as 'babyish' or 'unable to do things right?'
I am not suggesting that you are doing anything other than what I have done, blamed my child for not doing as good as his best day, on his normal days. That is the halmark of many 2E kids.
To put it another way. Suppose that you had to go through each day with a 20 pound weight strapped to your head. Wouldn't you try to 'skate away with the least possible effort?' Wouldn't you struggle to keep doing what you percieve that other people in your role who don't have 20 pound weights strapped to their heads do. Wouldn't you judge yourself by what the others were able to accomplish? And what if you were preparing a wonderful fancy dinner for a favorite family member, and you somehow managed to do it, because you were so very motivated, wouldn't you reproach yourself even more the next day when you returned to your struggle to do the ordinary things? How would you feel about those looks you got from the family member who is thinking, "If he or she can cook such a beautiful meal for my birthday dinner, why is tonight's meal so minimal and plain? He or she must not be trying today."
This can be very hard to hear, and I do want you to set standards for your son. But my Husband and I would have discussion after discussion trying to understand why our son seemed able to behave perfectly on one day (particularly if that day had special learning in it) and then behave dreadfully on the next day.
What I am hoping you will do is to adopt a 'value-free' vocabulary to refer to your son's challenges. His level of motivation may be high, but not high enough. His organizational skills may be strong in one area, but weak in getting ready for school. He may be strong in following through if someone else creates the structure, but weak in creating the structure for himself. Perhaps he Daydreams while getting read for school. This might be a weakness while trying to catch a bus, but a strength when he gets to school and there is little for him to learn, but he is motivated to not interrupt the classroom activities so he has to entertain himself.
Sadly, you can't work on everything at the same time. It can be challenging to decide what to do first: Psychoeducational eval, so that if he needs medicine to get that 20 pound rock off his head he gets it? What about Occupational Therapy so that he can learn to be strong in his body? Ride a 2 wheeler? Play kickball and wall ball with the other boys on the playground? Get his mornig routine in order? Drill Handwriting so that writing 3 sentences is easy - or start by drilling the verbal part of thinking of 3 sentences to write? Do you want to start entirely with yourself - organizing the environment so that there is less disraction? Starting a new 'fancy vocabulary word of the week?' (If so, I like the book 'Direct Hits Vocabulary) Getting more excersize so that your child might 'just naturally' want to do movement with you? Having more funtime scheduled so you can be more patient during the unfun times of parenting?
I could never hold all this in my head, so I encourage you to do some journaling and list making and start to figure out what your own prioities are.
More soon -
Grinity
