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ADD student? Just age? or asking too much?
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Greeting, This is my first year homeschooling and I need some advice. On a few topics. I am schooling my 5.5 y.o daughter with my 2.5 y.o floating in and out of the lessons. My 5.5 y.o. is a very smart girl. She is a very quick study,she is a wiz crack at math, she loves to be read to, LOVES outdoors and animals, loves to be the center of attention and she loves to learn. However she does not like to apply herself and if something is even remotely difficult she will just not do it, unless there is great motivation behind it. In which she will do the task, but begrudgingly with lots of drama despite all the positive leading we try to give her. She is always asking questions trying to figure things out and most times she is stuck in her own head. I have great difficulty getting her out of her own head. My husbands whole family is ADD and we are starting to see signs of in her too. A lot of people keep telling me it is her age but I am not sure about this. Our typical school day is a quick read from “Leading Little Ones to God” by Marian M. Schoolland coupled with Grapevine Trace your way through the Bible. A page from Phonics Pathways, And a little copy work to work on handwriting, a break, Math-U-See and then a book either for “science” (our favorites right now are the Smithsonian Backyard Series) or “history” which is whatever book from the library we find interesting. I rotate history and science throughout the week. I try to keep the lessons short and to the point but she refuses to listen or apply herself unless she finds what we are doing that day easy. Also she does not like arts and crafts so that approach was a epic fail. So I avoid that entirely. She does like drawing in her Nature Notebook. Once we are finished with science/history then the rest of the day is spent in either free play with her sister, our once a week play date, a visit from Grandma, and then errins i.e. food shopping. At night my husband reads more to both girls. They really love to be read too. While teaching, I have tried approaches such as letting her draw on a dry erase board while I read to her, or let her fiddle with a toy or random object. I have let her stand during lessons and even take many, short breaks. The problem I am having is she either doesn’t listen at all because those things I just mentioned are a distraction and allow her to more easily slip into her head or I can not seem to get her back on task or listen again if I actually had her listening to begin with. I cannot figure out how to help her overcome succumbing to frustration and being resentful when she is asked to apply herself. We have a reward system in place that worked for a while and I was very diligent to keep it up, but now that seems old hat to her too and not worth it. Am I asking too much? Pushing too hard? She wants to learn but not if she has to listen and think it becomes horrible for both of us. I am not a creative person at all so I struggle with trying to be creative to help her learn. If I am asking too much, where do I scale back? Thank you in advance for your thoughts and comments.
I think your routine sounds fabulous and admirable. I don’t have ADD experience, but I do have three girls (2 are adults, one is 7.5, all homeschooled) and in my small experience, the ability to apply themselves does increase greatly with maturity. Only you know whether this is a character issue for her, and I know you’ll get great advice from people with ADD experience, too. Take heart – she’s young.
My guess is that she is a perfectionist, which is why she is resistant to new things . She doesn’t like to fail.
Modeling failure can help. Making mistakes on purpose and modeling good self talk will help. This isn’t a quick fix. It takes a lot of repetitions. For example, my drawing skills are minimal. I draw and show my children how silly my drawing looks. I drew a duck that looked like a soap pump. My dd8 still reminds me about how silly it looked. I said that it was fine, because I am good at other things.
Another reason a child doesn’t like new things sometimes is because they feel threatened by not knowing what is about to happen. Some children don’t like surprises. Giving choices as much as possible helps too. Example, reading or math first today?
Emphasize how many things she does well and how education is about learning how to do things. Mistakes are how we learn. If she did everything perfectly it’s because she already knew it. To learn new things, we make mistakes and practice.
Keep your discussions short and repeat often.
As for the attention issues, I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t correct for every offense and keep in the front of my mind whether she is paying attention or not. With ADD, it is difficult to pay attention without some sort of movement, be it drawing, wiggling, etc. As long as she is quiet and in the room, it is enough at age 5. You would be surprised that even though the child doesn’t appear to be listening, often times they are.
Sizzlebop.com has great ideas for ADD.
Use questions to regain her attention. It is difficult to resist questions.
With one of my children, I used a question as a que to get him to answer me. I said, “What do you do when someone calls your name? ”
The answer was to go to the person and say what.
This child is often in his own head and needed to practice listening to my voice and responding properly.
Keep a positive attitude, and know that you are not alone. The first year is the hardest. Pray, and study your daughter, and you will find the perfect answers for your family. Keep up the good work!
I have lots of thoughts on your experiences. Some of my thoughts even contradict one another, so I’ll share them all and you can sort through what applies and what doesn’t. 🙂 I’m coming from a “we’ve always homeschooled, mom of many (9)” perspective.
1. First thought – I wouldn’t begin formal school with a child before age 6 unless it is something they are asking to do, and only do it when they ask after that. Truly. Currently 6 of my kids are age just turned 6 and older. The other 3 are younger. Kids need to be little. They need to play way more than they do formal learning. They will burn out if you begin too young. So maybe drop all school unless she asks to do something specific, then do that thing and move on. Still keep interesting things around for her to use/try. But don’t schedule work for her to do each day. For example, I might pull out something to do MYSELF at the table and then my child may or may not want to join me. I may set up a game and see if it catches her interest. I could put out a magnifying glass, rocks, and a book about rocks with tons of photographs and leave it to be approached or ignored. I would keep up family read alouds, we’ve always done that, but it’s pretty flexible for kids under 6, you have to stay in the room and quiet so others can hear, but you are welcome to play or sleep or listen.
2. Perfectionist children don’t like taking risks. If they are not pretty sure they can do something well, they won’t try. Especially if they have areas that have come easy to them all along, then when they have to actually work to learn/do something and mess up more than once they just refuse to try. I have one child who is extremely bright (taught himself to read chapter books by age 3.5, with comprehension) and he will shut down completely if something is outside his comfort zone or areas of mastery. He’ll cry. He’ll yell. He’ll just refuse to even try. He’s 9. It has been this way pretty much always. We are now, at 9, to a point where we’ve dialoged that everyone has to try and work and learn and fail in some areas over and over because if everything came easy to us life would get pretty boring. We want to seek out those challenge areas and make small, regular attempts in them to stretch our learning muscles and get better eventually. But at 5 – nope. He couldn’t understand that. So we focused on areas he was comfortable with doing things in. And we modeled and verbalized often when we were trying new things and it didn’t work out, or how we were feeling about something new to us or hard for us.
3. ADD – I highly suggest reading Smart, but Scattered. Some kids need to learn specific executive function skills that others pick up on their own, and ADD kids are in that grouping. (I have a child who, due to medical issues he’s had from before birth, has a high likelihood of having executive function issues that will be debilitating as he grows up, so we’re already learning about this and finding ways to learn or cope with these learning differences. His brain is literally shaped and structured differently and had had stress and pressures on it from before birth).
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