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short lessons fail
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Help! It seems that the curricula I picked for math and writing are NOT conducive to short lessons. We went with Christian Light education for math and the complete writer for writing. I like them both, but the lessons for each take W-A-Y too long. My son especially is struggling–he need short lessons of his brain disengages. I tried breaking the writing lessons into 2 days but it doesn’t work well, some days are really short and some really long. Sometimes we’d go several days without actual writing and he and I don’t see eye to eye on where to divide up lessons.
I’m reluctant to do math lessons over two days because I don’t want it to take two years to finish a year of math. There is a lot of review built in so I’m concidering having him do every other problem and saving odd problems for things he needs extra work on. ( and I’m thinking of scraping the complete writer altogether– before l pull out all my hair)
I’d be supper greatful for any advice. Thanks
You’re not the first to find yourself in this position! Two ways come to mind:
1. Do these subjects more than once a day, breaking the work into 2 short lessons. So math might get done first thing in the morning (half the work) and then you may have another math session two hours later. Some kids won’t mind this. Most of mine rebel over it. They want math over and done in one session.
2. Do less. Nobody says you have to complete the entire math page. So just like you said, choose part of the problems to do each day and only use the others when you find he’s having trouble with a concept. I’m currently doing this with my 7 year old. He’s well into Math U See Beta and working on subtraction with borrowing. Instead of doing 15-20 problems he does 8-10. So long as he is grasping the concept well and not having difficulty we keep this up. If we hit a concept he just doesn’t grasp as well he does half the page 1 day and half the next, taking longer than usual for a week of math, but the goal for us is mastery, not finishing a book in x number of days. Slower won’t hurt if it is needed!
I’m not familiar with the Complete Writer, are you doing it daily or every other day? If every other day then you could split lessons and do writing daily instead. If you are already doing it daily just trust the process, go slower. Look ahead at a week’s lessons and choose your daily stopping place before you are working with your child on the lesson. Mark each day’s stopping place with a highlighter or pencil mark. Then in the moment there is no “can I stop here?” from him, he can see exactly how much he’ll have to do to be finished.
We used Christian Light for Language Arts and Math last year and while it’s a very thorough curriculum, it started DRAGGING on and on. For math, I ended up going through each lesson and x-ing out parts that I felt we didn’t need more practice on. My daughter was starting to hate doing school work, so we had to end our relationship with CLE and move on to something else. I don’t NOT recommend CLE, but if you’re Charlotte Mason or have kids with a very short attention span, it’s not a good fit.
I don’t have any experience with either program but I was wondering what age your son is and if you use a timer? We use timers with most of our lessons and sometimes by chapters/lessons. A set amount of time is expected to be spent on a subject and it ends when the timer goes off (we may finish up the paragraph to end at a good spot). We just can’t spend all day on one subject or we’ll be so frustrated that no one wants to do anything else, or ever go back to the dreaded material, ever.
Just a thought.
Lots of great ideas! We’ve done all of these depending on the child or curriculum:
- cut out math problems or parts of their language arts (especially anything leaning toward busywork)
- stopped when the timer buzzed and started in that spot for the next lesson–we often do this for copywork
- finished up later in the day–we do this a lot for math
- added more lesson times in the week (for things that aren’t already on a daily basis)–This made a huge difference when we did Apologia science (we went from 2 days/week to 5 days/week).
This year I am focusing on timing our subjects and stopping when we reach a pre-set time. It’s amazing how much more we accomplish this way. No more dawdling children taking an hour to complete a short math assignment!!
We use CLE math, and the suggestions you’ve recievec are exactly what we do for math, depending on the child and depending on the day, and depending on what all is going on.
My 9yo actually skipped book 210 altogether, because I knew book 301 would reciew everything. My 11yo does the problems she thinks are the hardest, and whatever types of problems she gets wrong on the quizzes and tests, she has to do all of those until she gets them all correct.
So, feel free to wiggle within the curricukum – you’d do the same thing if you were in front of a classroom……..(well, maybe not nowadays, with everyone so focused on the TESTS…..)
“This year I am focusing on timing our subjects and stopping when we reach a pre-set time. It’s amazing how much more we accomplish this way. No more dawdling children taking an hour to complete a short math assignment!!”
But, what if this does not encourage better focus and attention? I’ve found when I try to do this, she just gets less done because it’s a shorter time. It simply does not help her focus any better. Then what to do?
Lindsey S-How old is your son? I would do the odd or even problems for math and, depending on age, you may be able to cut the writing curriculum out completely and switch to Charlotte Mason’s recommendations for young children. Her methods are short, sweet and effective. 🙂
CDP4774, that has sometimes happened in this house, too!
I think that using a timer works best when you know for a fact that the child CAN complete x number of problems in y number of minutes. Then, you tell the child to do so, and to stop working when the timer goes off. Then, if the child hasn’t finished the determined number of problems, he goes back to working on that while the rest of the family is having snack or is having free time or something like that.
CDP,
This has been a struggle here as well. That’s why for math, I usually have them finish it up after lunch if they aren’t already done. My DC find it enough of an incentive to finish up before lunch so they can have some free time in the afternoon. This has definitely been something we’ve had to work on in our house!
Is there something besides an attention problem? My DS was recently struggling to finish his work on time…In fact he wouldn’t get a single one done! It turned out my DS was struggling to copy his problems onto graph paper (my older DC do all their work on graph paper). After I started copying his problems for him, he became much more likely to finish before lunch. Is there a similar issue that may be causing difficulty? Maybe do a few pages with them (having them talk through the problems with you) to see if there’s anther issue besides focus.
Another possible factor is difficulty of the problems. We use MUS and I’ve learned that the problems often get much more difficult in the third quarter of the book. For example, Gamma focuses on learning multiplication facts for the first 1/2. When you get to the beginning of the 2nd 1/2, it starts with multiple digit multiplication. That’s much more time consuming and difficult than just memorizing facts. We have to really slow down in these sections. One we get through this spot, we can usually pick up the pace for the last few lessons. One of my DC recently covered long division. Instead of getting frustrated that they struggle in these sections, I’ve learned to accept that we need to really slow down in these spots. Some days I only assigned 4 problems after doing a couple together. As they progress through the difficult lessons, they usually pick up the pace when they have more practice.
Math has been a difficult subject for my oldest. I’ve had to really figure out a way to let it not take up our entire day. We’ve struggled with it for years, but are finally figuring out ways to make it work in our house. Short lessons, consistency of getting to it every day, and their habit of attention have been the key for us.
My oldest needs me to sit beside her and read the math lesson to her – not because she can’t read, but because she’s such an aural learner. So I’ve learned that if I just take 10-15 minutes to go over the lesson with her and do the sample problems, she understands the lesson better, has a better attitude and is able to successfully do the lesson.
I also have a mom-friend who says that math is something that needs to be taught- that the best curriculum on the world will always fail because math needs to be explained out loud, by talking, not by reading. I don’t know if I agree 100% or not, but it’s food for thought.
I do want to work on getting my oldest to read lessons out loud to herself to start teaching herself……
Karen,
I agree with your friend that for many children that is true. A dvd program works for some. With several of my children they need a live teacher. Right Start is working well for them.
I use CLE math and we cross off problems because it would take so long. Whatever they had wrong the day before I make sure they do those problems but if there is something they are sailing along on I will have them skip most of those.
Thank you for all the suggestions. We used them all. I divided his math lesson into 2 and crossed off every other problem (I counted and there were 68 problems in the lesson–uggg!). And we also used a timer for all\ everyone’s lessons. It felt a little odd as I was calling out “time for the next subject” every half hour, but we got done much quicker and everyone seemed much more alert.
We also scraped “The complete writer” and went back to written narrations of their independent reading. That went well today. I’m trying to come up with some ideas to help them stretch themselves and add some variety to their writing here. Any ideas?
Thanks again for all the great suggestions!
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