We've had ongoing issues in regard to disorganization with dd#1. I've sought advice IRL from her school and teachers as well as online over the past few years. Nothing seems to have helped.
Quick background:
Dd will be 11 in a few weeks and just started 7th grade having skipped 5th last year.
We had hoped that, with more challenging work, she'd have to step up to the plate and get more organized or suffer the consequences of lower grades. That didn't happen. She still lost books, homework, forgot to bring things home... None the less, she is still testing in the 99th percentile on nationally normed achievement tests for her current grade and she maintained a straight A avg in accelerated classes last year.
On day one of school, she has already lost her math homework. Given her very good memory, she remembered all of the problems and rewrote them on a new piece of paper and completed the work anyway. She was in tears over this, though, and felt really badly that she was sure that she put the paper in her binder and couldn't figure out why it wasn't there.
We've tried pocket notebooks, an accordian file (worked kind-of okay), three-ring binder, and virtually every other type of organization device we can come up with to get her to keep her papers together and not lose them.
She uses a planner at school (sort-of). She often forgets to write in it or doesn't have time, but she always remembers what the assignments were at the end of the day and just fills it in then when I bug her to do so. I refused to sign her planner last year if she didn't fill it in at school (she gets points for parents signature and complete planner), but it didn't seem to make her any better at getting it done during class when the teachers posted the assignments.
Solution ideas anyone?
I tossed out the idea of having her repeat 6th grade today at another school so as to reduce the embarrassment factor just to give her a year where the work is easy and where she can focus on little but organization, but I honestly don't know that this would solve the problem. She was no more organized in elementary when the work was very easy.
Can anyone come up with anything else we can do to get her to pay attention and make sure that she has everything at the end of the day and hasn't lost any of her papers?
