It's amazing how fast you can go when you can just write it down on the paper at your convenience. A real eye opener to me.
This is so true - and I've found that teachers don't really understand or see the impact that these types of challenges have on how long it takes to complete homework.
As mon said, every student is different. For our ds, a piece of his disability is organizational skills (he has developmental coordination disorder) - and this impacted his ability to keep track of homework assignments as well as simply bringing home what he needed for each class at night etc. Sixth grade was his first year of middle school and switching classes, and rather than let it go and let him deal with consequences, I chose to work very closely with him every day to make sure he was on top of his assignments. When I picked him up at school I asked him specifically about every class he had, what homework did he have in that class, when was it due. We checked his backpack to make sure he had all the books etc that he needed to do his homework that night. I checked his locker to make sure he'd put all his papers in binders etc. When we were home we made a plan on what homework he'd work on when (and included downtime... including Minecraft ;)). I made sure he had snacks and wasn't hungry. I checked in with him frequently to make sure he was making progress (and also to encourage him to use his laptop rather than handwriting). His school was sending home monthly updates that listed grades as well as missing assignments etc and I reviewed all that with him, and if he had something missing we found it and had him turn it in; if he had a low grade on something I had him ask why and follow up with makeup work if the teacher offered it. It was a *ton* of oversight and I'm sure the parents of NT kids here are thinking "what the heck????" but... after a year of that uber-oversight, my ds did get to a place where this year he's doing fairly well handling all of that on his own. I haven't needed to do that with my other kids, and I doubt that most parents ever need to - but a big part of my ds' challenge is that he needs a lot of repetition to develop automaticity in these types of tasks. Sometimes, for some kids, it can help to step in and just manage the situation as a way of teaching them how to learn how to do it for themselves.
Might be totally irrelevant for your ds
.. but it occurred to me that organizational skills are sometimes a challenge for kids with ADHD.
polarbear
