One of the banes of student life has to be homework. Even the Monster, who’s in a specialized school, gets homework on a near daily basis to reinforce what he’s going over in class. It’s rarely very much, and it is appropriate to what’s on his IEP, but it’s homework nonetheless. Continue reading
homework
“But it doesn’t count”
Like every school child, the Monster has homework most nights of the week.
I’m not sure I remember what homework was like for me when I was a second grader. I wasn’t a typical student, but from what I can remember from second grade, it mostly involved working on book reports, basic addition and subtraction, things like that.
The Monster, with his IEP, works on a lot different things than I recall. Continue reading
Math Matters
This evening, part of my task was to get the Monster’s homework done.
I don’t know how much the Monster really gets the basic concepts of math in the abstract. He does, certainly, recognize numbers and can read out a ‘math sentence’ (what most of us recognize as an equation) to the point where he’s required to fill in the answer. But he’s not making the mental jump to do the problems in his head. Continue reading
Dumbing it Down
The Monster’s homework is checked on Mondays, so we’ll admit that there are times that we slack a little bit in getting it done ‘on time’. Since he only has homework from Monday through Thursday nights, it’s easy enough to spread out four nights of homework over seven days and get it done in doses that he can cope with.
On the other hand, though, as we mentioned, his homework’s not really being adapted for his level. Continue reading
Implementation Issues
Because we’re not seeing any adaptation to the Monster’s homework, we decided to speak up – I’m a big believer in “say something”, rather than hoping for the best.
It’s not that the Monster is unable to do the homework when it’s something factual. It’s when homework is more open-ended, when it requires some creative input, that he needs more guidance due to the way Autism affects his language processing. So telling him to “write a sentence of five words or more, using at least three sight words” is not a direction he can easily handle, for example. Continue reading
Adapting
Today is the end of the second week of first grade for the Monster. (Why our schools here start before Labor Day, I know not.) And as such, this is also the end of the second week of homework.
Now, the Monster’s teacher apparently only checks homework on Monday, which is good because his work did not get done last night – I had my PCAB meeting, and the wife had choir rehearsal, so he had to go to choir with her and didn’t get a chance to work on it. So we’ll get that done tonight.
The only problem, though, is that I question how well his homework might be adapted to him. Continue reading
Homework Blues
I mentioned in a prior post (see here) that the Monster has homework on a nightly basis.
Now, I like that he has homework – it’s something that will get him in good position for when he does finally get back into a more mainstreamed environment. Continue reading
Adaptations
New IEP or no (and at the moment, it is ‘no’), the Monster’s doing alright in school on an academic level. Continue reading