12yos takes forever to do school…

I have a lot of thoughts on this one!  Bear with me, okay?

First, know that you aren’t alone and more than likely your son isn’t doing this on purpose, or at least not totally.  I have one daughter so far (9 kids but oldest is only 14, so not all school age yet) who falls to this extreme.  There are some things we’ve found that work well, and some desperation measures that we also have had to use sometimes.  I’ll detail those next.

A few things that have helped at various times:

– Give a checklist.  They see and can mark off each item that must be done that day.  They know how much is left to do.  They know what needs done and it frees you up to do what you need to do while they work.

– Isolate in a non-distracting space and require them to stay there until work is done.  Add white noise or noise cancelling headphones if noises distract.  Shut curtains so they can’t see outside (visual distractions).

– Be sure you aren’t handing them busy work – if it isn’t important, don’t waste their time on it.

– Read up on executive functioning skills, this is probably an area he needs strengthened.  Smart, but Scattered is an excellent book for this.

– Desperation move: once you know the amount of work you are asking them to do is reasonable and you’ve made as many helps for them as is reasonable then walk away.  They sit and work however fast or slow they want, but let them know that until X, Y, Z is complete they don’t get to eat lunch (or dinner, whichever).  Now, this is important – you have to know what you are asking is reasonable for this child, if not too easy.  Because part of this is probably bad habits at this stage too.  So you want to work on supporting and on leaving him to do his own work and face the consequences for goofing off when that is the case.

So, for this particular desperation move, be sure you ask ridiculously easy – half the math page – for example.  And stick to the consequence.

For my particularly distractible child it took a mix of all these before we broke her bad habit of dawdling that was combining with her distractibility.  Once the dawdling habit was broken we were just focusing on helping her with skills and the right environment to overcome her distractibility and poor executive functioning skills.

For the warm and snuggly – what about starting your school time off with together things like reading a chapter from a great story, looking at art, listening to a piece of classical music together, baking together, etc?  It could be anything, just have that touch point to start your day.  Or have that touch point right after lunch to reconnect mid-day.

Well, I tried to post the links anyhow! They looked fine until I hit submit.

Google Afterthoughts blog, Scheduling for peace and the blog posts should pop up.

Wonderful posts from a CM mom. 🙂

You could always continue your Bible program and devotional readings but you could break them down into shorter lessons. We do this with so many programs. A large part of a CM curriculum is to keep the lessons short.

Children are more likely to dawdle when they know the lessons are going to stretch out indefinitely. A set time can often help to keep them on track. Keeping to Charlotte Mason’s idea of short lessons has kept my children from becoming dawdlers.

I keep our religious readings down to a 30 minute time slot each day. If I want to go through a devotional book or religious book that doesn’t fit in that time slot, I will fit it into some other curriculum time slot. We might read that book once a week as part of our read alouds or during my daughter’s reading time.

It’s so hard because there are so many things we want to teach our children! So many books to read! So many gaps to fill! However, the reality is that we just can’t do it all so we are going to have to narrow down the choices and that means eliminating a lot of really great programs and books from the schedule. However, this does force us to really think about what is best for our families and what is most important for each of our children.

Yes! Keep those warm and snuggly times! We have daily read aloud time in our house and that was continued all the way up until my son’s graduation. 🙂