I'm deschooling/reschooling my kid after sending him to school last year made him not want to do any work. The teacher let him get away with not doing his work for several months without letting me know before she kicked him out of her class. She allowed him to say "I don't know how" (to write a single letter several times in a row before the timer goes off) when the teachers and the principal all said they know he CAN do it, they just don't know why he wasn't. (but don't worry, he'll be fine because he's smart). So now I need to get him back in the habit of working.
I'm using the "Transforming the Difficult Child" method of setting him up for success, where they said to set the bar so low that they automatically clear it. The book said the way they teach Shamoo to jump in the air in Sea World is by putting the rope on the ground and giving him a fish everytime he jumps over it, then raising the rope.
I have to teach five subjects by Texas homeschool law: grammer, spelling, math, reading, and citizenship. I bought "Writing With Ease" which expects the child to copy one sentence every day with a little grammer theme. One week it was pronouns, one week it was titles of respect like Mrs., Mr., Prince., Dr. The thing is it's quick & short & you just have to do it right with proper capitals, lowercase, and punctuation, and pretty handwriting. Now the lessons have grown from copywork to taking oral dictation & writing down the sentence I tell him verbally. He has to do one Writing With Ease everyday, one math everyday, and one other subject (rotated).
I don't schedule lessons ahead of time. I bought a day planner and record the daily work after it's done. I unschool every other week. On those weeks I write Unschool week in the planner and just write down anything close to work that he does (read a book, paint or draw, play games). Right now his problem isn't skills or content, but following a schedule and doing his work. I set the bar very low, three subjects a day, every other week. He's succeeding in meeting these goals with rarely any resistence. The other day he said, "I need to do four subjects everyday because I want to do History everyday." (Tracing & coloring maps & flags for American Geography). This statement only lasted one day, but I was thrilled because until then I had a kid who dreaded doing the bare minimum. The rope on the floor is working and I saw a little spark back for his love of learning.
I'm using Singapore Math textbook, Beast Academy ($100 for the whole set), Bedtime Math and SumDog.com for math. I'm about to buy Mastering the Fundamentals of Math from the Great Courses. I'm rotating between assigning reading a little chapter book (Cam Jansen, Junie B Jones), or writing a little summary of a picture book, or co-reading a streatch book (Sophie's World, Wall Street Journal Article), or reading Scholastic books plays using teddy bears and army men for reading.
For citizenship we're doing "notebooking" with the Usborne World History Encyclopedia. It's really note-taking, finding the main idea of non-fiction. I read the two-page spread, he tells me the most important part, I don't correct him. I write down what he says. He draws an illustration on the page. We put it in the history notebook. We're also adding tracings of American Geography from Imagene Forte's "One Nation 50 States" to the history notebook. I own "Stand up for Your Rights" (about human rights for kids, by kids from the UN). We're not into that book yet. It includes stuff I'm not ready to talk about yet, but it's going into the citizenship course. I have The Constitution translated for kids, which we'll dig into after he finishes tracing the maps. And I just ordered "Mr. President: a book of US Presidents."
Spelling is super easy. I have a phonetically controlled book of spelling lists from a one room schoolhouse (it was my grandmothers grandfathers). He copies one list of six words from a word family 3 times. Eventually we'll add doing definitions, writing a sentence, and memorizing spellings for tests. Right now I just want him to develop a habit of doing spelling class. It's a start. Grammer is super easy, he just reads a few pages of the "Grammer Island" book from Michael Clay Thomson. I'm not sure which one I want to buy next, "Music of the Hemishpheres" or "Sentence Island".
