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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.

My guess is that he is really, really bored, and doesn't yet have the maturity to get it out of the way so he can do something else.

Can you make his work harder? Ask him to focus on something else- like how many noses are supposed to be colored blue? I'm not sure how to make letter tracing tricky. If I could satisfy myself that my kid didn't really need the tracing practice I'd be tempted to let him skip it.

KJP
This is very familiar sounding, I SO know how you are feeling. Here's my take from my dealing with my DS now 6.5, he is not dyslexic, but has writing issues being remediated with OT.

First, those sound like incredibly boring worksheets. As an adult I don't like doing things that are a waste of my time but do them because of all reasons I'm supposed to. At 5, your DS doesn't have that. He is trying to make very boring more interesting. This has the annoying side affect of making these simple things take longer - this bothers the adult - it's unclear what DS thinks as he is doing it to make it more interesting, presumably it's working to some extent.

My DS in first, drops his pencil, rocks the chair, notices everything in his room he has seen a hundred times, all to avoid doing the work. Just this morning, we have a certain amount left to do before Monday, busy tomorrow, please do this math worksheet now, DS negotiates to just do half, ends up doing the whole worksheet in the 10 minutes I expected it would take if actually sat down and did it rather than the 10 minutes plus whatever drama or distraction because I didn't require him to do all, he skipped the drama and distraction.

We always have agita regarding the writing. Here is what we have learned:

1 - let go the frustration, DH and I would get SO irritated at the delays and have had big yelling bouts with him. Not productive and worse because he has some disability impacting him, even if he didn't, our frustration does not help. So now, and you might have to phase this in as he learns to do this at school, we ask him to work independently. So he does and then we come back and check, rather than sitting there stewing watching him make like the slowest snail on the planet.

2 - working in clumps. We do not do the whole thing in one sitting if can avoid it. Writing assignments we break down to 2-3 sentences at a time. Or we have him dictate, we write it out, and then he copies it, so he doesn't have to remember what he wants to say and concentrate on the letter formation at the same time, which is hard for him.

3 - we stopped caring about coloring, and/or drawing. Most of the time it looked unrecognizable, and well into April of K I think he still just colored big blobs. Now his stuff is more recongizable but he is not an artist and likely won't be. We focused on what mattered to him, it hurt him that he couldn't make things look like they were in his head. So we got him Ed emberly's drawing books which show how to make things step by step - put a box, then a circle - it helped him to understand how you draw

4 - he's getting OT so we try to not be the one teaching him or overly correcting him, instead try to focus on the biggest issue - for DS it's spacing and the impact on legibility. And we ask him to look at it and see what the problem is.

5 - we are more proactive about what he needs - he has a different notebook and paper from his classmates. And it bothers me that he needs the big lines, but he is really progressing, I focus on that, and I try to get him to focus on that

6 - talk to DS as much as necessary about how no one is good at everything, physical things must be practiced to get better. Writing is worth doing. Homework is worth doing.

7 - not stressing about it being perfect, letting the teacher see what he did, warts and all, if he did a crappy job because he wasn't in the mood fine, but he also might have done a crappy job because he can't fit his correctly spelled answer in on the worksheet line because it's too small - teacher needs to see that

It's still stressful - tomorrow is going to suck because I know he doesn't want to write the answer to the question which is totally uninteresting to him. So we will do what is the minimum. That goes against my grain but it makes the point which DS struggles with mightily - you have to do stuff you don't want to do. However, it also acknowledges that this is hard for him, his arm is tired, he knows others do better, so it's ok. We arent letting him off the hook but we aren't penalizing him for having the disability either.

Hope my view from the trenches helps!

DeHe

Not having children, I can't really advise you, however, the handwriting issues stuck out to me, as I have Dysgraphia. It's a disability with handwriting and using the written word as a means of espression/communication. It and its cousin Dyscalculia are not as well know as Dyslexia.

I know exactly how you feel. My DS has hypotonia - specifically affecting his hands (and in his trunk leading to postural weakness). This is how writing tasks are for us too... add to that the worksheets really are boring - particularly for gifted and/or creative kids. Your DS and mine would get along great. LOL.

DeHe has really GREAT suggestions! I have started being a scribe for my DS on homework (particularly on nights where he has already had an hour of OT for writing)... He breezes through the work when I scribe for him (like he did like 5 or 6 pages of math homework so fast and happily when I was writing his answers for him and really the point of the work was the math not the writing).

Does you DS have hypotonia?

I found this story http://teachingat.info/writing/index.html (and site) inspiring... I feel so alone - like, we know kids with asd and adhd/add and speech issues and all kinds of stuff but no one with a kid who has a high IQ with hypotonia... I find it isolating and demoralizing. And I have to KEEP EXPLAINING the nature of the disability over and over again to the teachers and school staff (nice people but sheesh). It's so hard when you got a smart kid with a very real and rather invisible disability.

Hi,

DS5 has an OT and is working on HWT with them. His school is implementing it also to some degree and also using their own methods. I think with the HWT he really will learn to write! It's a bit slow though in that they've only covered maybe 6 uppercase letters so far.

For right now DH and I have chosen not to stress handwritng at all for worksheets (we are doing some afterschooling as his K is mostly play and what isn't play is inappropriately levelled (except for the writing portion)).

We got a set of letter and number stamps, suddenly DS has a much happier attitude about approaching the work. Also I will let him make worksheets into a matching with lines versus write out an answer. I feel justified in letting him out of some of it because he truly is working on the handwriting in other ways, every time he looks at a worksheet he does not need to feel like a failure. Drawing a line from one place to another is hard enough for him that it's still good practice on his fine motor skills.

For homework from schools, I've seen on here where parents will send in worksheets the child has done at home that are in the same subject but appropriately levelled. Ie instead of a circle the Hs page, send back a word search puzzle they've done instead with a note that you'll be providing differentiated homework if it something you know they've mastered.

All the arranging and rearranging sound a bit like avoidance techniques. The challenge will be discovering what is being avoided. If it is a developmental delay that is affecting the difficulty of completing that task (like dyslexia, etc.), then it will simply take time and whatever help is needed to acquire accomodations. If it is avoiding boring, pedantic assignments, that will likely take a wish from a Genie to resolve.:)

Either way, sending you some commiseration!

Thanks for the replies everyone. I am going to try some of these suggestions this week and see if things improve.

I am also going to try to tap into his creative side and see if that helps. The worksheet that he did without trouble involved him creating story with the pictures. This wasn't part of the instructions, just something he did on his own. I think I will try using this week's pictures as a scavenger hunt list. See if he can find other pictures to match in his own books or the actual objects in our house. Then see if he'll color them to match. Or just see if I can get him to make up another story.

Or...if he really just detests coloring (either motorically or philosophically), maybe he would prefer to make a "collage". Instead of coloring, let him look through old magazines and cut out matching pics to the illustrated pics OR any variety of "s" words if the teacher doesn't mind. My ds (also in K) keeps bringing home similar worksheets they do in class. His are little square pics he is to color, cut and paste. The pics are scribbled hastily with a single color and pasted crookedly on the page. The back of his sheets, however, are filled with the most delightful "water treatment plant blueprints" and scenes or volcanic eruptions. Go figure.

Hmmm...so tonight I just left him to it and it worked. I told him to let me know when it was done and whatever time was left over could be spent playing Wii. I guess if there is no one there to listen, complaining doesn't have much appeal.