Sorry this is kind of long...
Every week one worksheet gets sent home with my son for homework. He is in K. Last week it was something where there were like fifty boxes each with a picture inside. If the picture showed something with a "h" sound, he was to color it yellow. Any other sound was to be colored blue. At the end, the yellow boxes made a path that connected a lost dog to his home. He worked through it by himself but made it more fun. When he went through the boxes and sort of trashed talked the pictures like "Hey there car, you don't belong here. I am coloring your box blue.". When he finished the blue boxes he started down the revealed path and made up a story about the dog encountering the objects in the boxes on his way home before coloring them yellow.
There was no nagging required on my part.
Every other week, including this week, it has been a worksheet that is similar but probably easier. There are fewer pictures, nothing is revealed, it is just color all the "k" words. He just about drives me crazy with how long it takes him to color eight little pictures. He wants to sharpen the colored pencils, or make a fence with them around the worksheet or roll them around. Or he asks questions about the pictures. "why do pictures of kings always have the king with a beard?", "do dad kangaroos have pouches too", "why do they always make the kite diamond shaped with a tail that has bows?" Or he just does it weird like coloring the kissing people to look like zombies and everything else colored "rainbow". "Rainbow" looks a lot like scribbling a little of each color on every picture.
It is like if it is hard, it is easy and if it is easy, it is hard!
He eventually finishes but I have keep at him to get him to work on it. He'll color the kissing zombies, then mess around making shapes and letters out of the pencils, then I redirect him, then he partially colors a kangaroo and goes off on questions about them, then I answer and tell him to keep coloring, then he complains that he doesn't like homework, or coloring, or his hand hurts or he needs a drink, or a snack, or a bathroom break, then I tell him to keep coloring, then we are on the the kite and repeat.
I am pretty sure this same sort of hassle is going on at school. He eventually gets it done but it takes a lot of prodding.
Thoughts?
Now to make it trickier - If there is a handwriting section on a worksheet, I can expect lots of resistance. Last night writing three lower case "j"'s correctly took probably a dozen tries. There was an example j right next to where he needed to write. There were four traced j's and still it was so hard for him. The tail wouldn't go the right way or it would be all above the bottom line. He does HWT with his OT (sensory issues and muscle weakness) and the letters they have done are easier for him so I think the HWT curriculum clicks with him better than the school's method of tracing each letter forty times. When her son was in K, our OT offered to do HWT at the school and teach the teachers the methods but they declined. So right now HWT is on upper case and school is on lower case. I am hoping in a few months they'll have both covered the whole alphabet and things will be easier. It would be nice if they could synchronize but the school goes in order and HWT groups by how the letters are started.
Some of you might recall we have thought he might have dyslexia. He is reluctant to do letter and number work at school and home but at this point, after talking to a dyslexia remediation specialist, we are just doing the HWT.
So I am looking for suggestions on what might be the problem and tips for how to make this easier.
