Our sixth child is cut out of a different piece of cloth than the first five. He was the first to really have serious problems in school, which he did almost from his first day of kindergarten.
When we began homeschooling him at the end of grade 2, it took him a good eight months to really settle down. He hadn't done well with workbooks in regular school, and he didn't do well with them at home either. After a few months, we discovered "literature-based" curriculum, and began doing a lot of reading. I eventually found out that what worked for us was for me to read his books aloud to him, ask him the questions in the teachers' guide or workbook, and let him answer orally. (Handwriting was a completely different issue at that point.) While I read to him, he was allowed to play at the table or on the floor with something that didn't make noise: Legos, playing with little plastic animals, drawing pictures, making crafts items out of paper, working with clay, and other stuff like that.
Is it Charlotte Mason who uses the term "strewing the path"? (All you Charlotte Mason people, help out here.) This means just making stuff available for kids to get interested in…leaving it lying around the house, having it arrive in the mail with their name on it, arranging a trip to go pick it out at a store, etc. Especially if it's new, different, colourful and not obviously educational, this works. You don't have to comment on it, just leave it lying around.
We skipped math for two years. This was partly accidental, as I forgot to order a math curriculum when I ordered everything else. Then, before I could feel really neglectful about not giving my 8-year-old third-grader math, I met a homeschooling woman doctor who was just graduating her older kids from high school and sending them off to college, who told me she never started her kids on math lessons till they were ten years old. There’s an article about why this is a good idea:
http://www.triviumpursuit.com/articles/ ... g_math.php
It’s quite a long article, but if you read quickly through the history part in the beginning, the rest of the article will explain why kids’ brains are not really ready for
formal math instruction until they’re about ten years old.
I mention this because this is the first year we’ve had any formal math since grade 2. He started grade 5 last fall, and turned 10 in October. Last summer, he suddenly asked if he could do math this year.
SHOCK!!!! My child was asking to learn something! So we got some workbooks and a teachers' guide. He doesn’t always
want to do them, but at 10 he has settled down quite a bit and he
can do several pages a day without acting as though I am punishing him cruelly and unusually. He's mature enough now that I can say, "Sit there and don't get up till you've finished the pages I marked, and I have to see them before you're considered to be finished." He wasn't mature enough to do that when he was seven or eight.
However, my best secret weapon is finding something to compliment him about. For some reason, he just blossoms when I do this. I finally figured out that identifying and commenting on something he’s done that is kind or helpful, or a wise decision he has made, can often snap him right out of a negative mood. Maybe this is one reason why chores can be so good for kids. It gives us a regular opportunity to compliment them for little things that really do improve the quality of life around the home.
I am NOT proposing that we go around offering praise for every little thing a child does, or that we never correct them. However, I think they do need a certain amount of sincere praise and appreciation.
I read somewhere, once, that for ADHD children in particular this offering of praise and appreciation is VERY important, and is often true of ADHD adults as well—that it’s important to surround yourself with people who like and appreciate you rather than with people who criticize you constantly. Maybe it’s because those who are distractible, forgetful and impulsive have so many opportunities for wrath to be called down upon their heads, that they need the other just to balance out.