This is sent out by a rather confused homeschooling Mom. I home school – two children. One is 9, almost 10 and a boy and he is in 4th grade. My second one is 8, last week and she is in the 2nd grade. It sounds rather odd for me to be blogging about this but I wanted to get input from any homeschoolers out in blogging land.
The kids are absolutely opposites when it comes to teaching them. My dilemma (right now anyway) is with my youngest, Mandy. Mandy is very intelligent and quite complicated. She is just going in to the area of writing in a small way. She is an absolute perfectionist. I have a book I write in for notes and to keep up with what we are doing – my teacher’s lesson plan, if you will. School has been in session for 4 weeks now, although we lost a week to evacuation. My notes in the last several weeks are as follows:
Wednesday, Aug 31st – Mandy will sit and stare at a paper forever if she doesn’t understand. I can explain it 5 different ways and she just glazes over. How do I get to her? It is like I have to get mad at her and then she will actually hear me.
Tuesday, Sept 13th – She took most of her time (over an hour) puzzling over a sentence she was supposed to write and then she wrote a very complicated 3 sentences. Her mind doesn’t work simply – If you ask her a question and give her enough time she will give you a synopsis of the subject. Is this good or bad?
Today, Thursday – Mandy is still having problems with writing. She either writes a long paragraph or doesn’t write anything. Today, given a time limit (she had been looking at this page for 30 minutes), on a page she accepted a “0” on the paper rather than try and write it in the 15 minutes. It was a series of topics and she was just supposed to make them specific rather than general.
This last one blew my mind because Mandy is a straight 100+ student. She doesn't’ get one wrong or 1/2 wrong she gets everything right and her grades are very important to her. But she accepted a 0 without comment.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to make this easier for both of us? I know writing is hard for her – she is so deep thinking that it takes forever and then she gives me masterpieces and she just turned 8.
Help!
