not doing year 7 homework

anyway

Neither likes being organised. DD2 only accepts help if there isn't any alternative.

DD1 is dyslexic and happily accepts proof reading. She is also very happy to chatter science and other subjects.

She wouldn't want you checking e everything she did. You can't a yeah, she does stuff on the bus and in the library.

phew nor have i starball, but apparently she is on course for her GCSEs....

And urban, I have straight As from before A* was invented.

I've never checked my DDs planners (can't read DD1s) and DD2's is pretty cryptic.

Had my parents tried to micro manage my HW I'd have just not written down anything I couldn't be bothered with (ie all Welsh, all RE, 90% of French and 50% of humanities) English was usually fun and our maths mistress was too nice to mess about.

urbancupcake you sound unbearably smug tbh

Urbancupcake-your child has only been at secondary school for a few weeks, I suggest you wait until you have some experience under your belt before before spouting off.
I have had DC in grammar school over the last9 years or so and so have seen scores of kids with different parental approaches.
The over involved parents like yourself always either overstress their kids, or turn them off.

@pixie - what an over generalised statement. Where did you pluck that from? Can only be from your own child and your own experiences. Well guess what - there's a mighty big world out there. My dd simply loves, loves, loved education and I mean, really loves it. Studying for xmas exams at the moment and never once have I had to prompt her to do her revision. Loves coming first, loves coming number 1. Not a lover of creative subjects mind, such as art and DT but hey ho, I guess that makes her normal as you can't be great at everything. She did say today however, that not everyone in her class is like that. Only about eight of them. the rest haven't studied at all and don't care either. A friend of mine was telling me today also she has four children, one was always into studying from the off. She'd pick up a book while the others would be on computer games all day. Guess which one left with a bucket load of A*. It may come as a shock to you that for some it's not a chore, they actually enjoy it.

Sorry to disappoint and apologies too that what happens in our world doesn't fit in with your view of the world, but in our home, education is fun.

Sorry, I'm with voddie on this one. There's a lot of work to manage from primary to secondary and until a solid work ethic is established, absolutely I will be there every step of the way which over time I've been able to reduce. For exams now for example, she can follow the template I put in place yonks ago and now it's a breeze for her.

Guidance is good- I have spoken before about our rolling homework list, with due dates and approximate time each thing should take that lives on our kitchen notice board. And providing space, materials and a listening ear are also good (the listening ear never stops- I have a 6th former!). But micro managing, pre marking work, sitting with a secondary school child while they work- no.

Sorry in Year 7 term 1 you still need to be on top of them in regard to knowing what needs to be done and when as a parent. Slowly letting go over year 7/8 so that by year 9 they have the work ethic. My DS will only just turn 11 by year 7 I will not suddenly go from primary school looking over his shoulder to letting him get on with it and for him to "accept the consequences" if he is not coping. They need guidance through those first few years in secondary IMO

And she's 14, in year 10 .

It completelty depends on the child pixie.

My ds became fully independent with regards to homework and exams by 10 years old.

I have no idea what he does or if he finds it hard/easy.

However, DD wanted and still wanrts a hell of a lot of interaction with me. She wants me to read over every homework, test her endlessly for exams etc...but she's not remotely switched off her education. Quite the opposite .

Urbancupcake you know this over-involvment is going to switch your kid off education, right?

@Goodking - it's not an easy road all this parenting lark. There will be something that motivates him. From an NLP course I did yonks ago it talked about the different character types and what get's them going. It's just finding that button. We too are wired to deal with difficult situations the same way so sometimes we have to look within and see where we're going wrong.

For example, I used to get cross with dd for missing out detail when she was telling me things, or getting Maths questions she knew like the back of her hand wrong. But then I had to remember her character type in that, she misses detail. And so instead of jumping up and down like a crazed nutter which is how I felt inside, I put a system in place so she doesn't forget the detail when doing Maths.

In any case, will join you all the the shed for a drink because it has been a tough week, it's Friday and I could so do with one.

Must admit dd's homework start time is at 6.30 as she travels a long way from school. Lately she has been negotiating an extra five minutes or so which is so counter productive as she just finishes later. Must reel it back in

Good suggestion urban, thanks. Our tactic does appear to involve sanctions rather than positive reinforcement. DH is quite set in his ways and it may be hard to get him onboard with that though.

I already have calmier, happier, easier parenting and the explosive child, plus I am doing an Incredbile Years parenting course. I am slowly working my way through them, and it's even more slowly making a difference. I work evenings so DH is in charge and I suspect, unwittingly undoing some of the things I have achieved.

The shed will be lovely; a toy and x-box free zone, with lots of lovely smooshy knitted and crocheted balnkets and cushions. Sherry very welcome

GoodkingWenceslack - I will join you in the shed and bring some sherry!

An interesting book is Calmer Happier Homework (or summat similar) by Noel Janis-Norton. I saw it on display in a bookshop and impulse bought it (while having a little sob of gratitude) and it certainly has some very interesting points. She is very good about homeowrk being at set times and how it releases anxiety from children when they know it is then, and once it is over it is over.

Personally, I think it goes too far - unless you want to spend all your time up to GCSE acting as a homework enabler-cum-cheerleader, but there are some really, really good suggestions in it.

Good luck in the garden shed, WencesLack!

In addition to our useful hours we sometimes control the computer using "ComputerTime" or "TimezupKidz". If your kid is like mine he is out of control with his computer usage. I drove me nuts so much I ended up writing my own program to lurk in the background and terminate games at certain times of day.

Goodking have you tried the forward approach as opposed to taking something away if he doesn't do it? By that I mean, knowing about something he really, really wants and saying to him, if you achieve X I'll get you Y (aka Bribery, but hey no shame on my game)?

You could suggest something along the lines of, if you get an eight out of ten for your next piece of science work I'l get you that game, or whatever. Shower with loads and loads of praise if achieved and even if you see him work just that little bit harder but still not achieve it, you could give him a slightly lesser gift but reward nonetheless, letting him know of course, it's because he tried so very hard.

Harping on about him not doing it is clearly achieving bugger all, so worth giving it a try. I swear by it because kids are often secretly so eager to please.

lurking for ideas. My DS has had three detentions this term for incomplete, forgotten, or poor quality homework. It has always been a falshpoint since early days of primary school (summer born boy just not ready for school) and is now painful to the point that if I could move into the garden shed I would.

DS says he is going to homework club, but we suspect he is fannying around on the computers and not actually doing anything. his school do have a bunch of sixth formers who help out and he seems to have tamed one for his own personal use!

We've talked to the school about the angst homework causes him and their response was to ease off and let him fail, secure ion the knowledge that he will wake up to it in due course. I am not entirely sure about this approach; I know my DS. However we've agreed to go along with this, but are keeping an eye and hoping that the school are too. They think it's more of a summer born thing than any real cause for concern.

The irritating thing is that he is bright as a button. He will spend hours researching and after a six week project on volcanoes, can tell me everything I ever needed to know about volcanoes and Mt St Helens, yet his written work (until we cajoled him into doing more) was two limp pages with no diagrams or anything.

I am swiftly running out of ideas.

@curlew - so our signatures mean two different things. Independently dd not doing too bad either as she's always first in exams or at the very least in the top three. As time has gone by she has needed less and less of my input too. Whatever label you want to give it therefore, be it micromanage or otherwise, it's working.

But I wouldn't be signing off work. I'm not her boss! I'm signing to say it has been done, not that it has been done to my satisfaction.

One of the purposes of homework is for teachers to see how kids can manage independently- what's the point of a teacher marking it if it's already been marked? And the teacher will have no idea if the child has understood it or is really for harder work if it's been micromanaged by a parent!

And why should the teacher be sacked?

@Curlew - what can I say? If you'd be happy signing off work with missing full stops and speech marks and saying the teacher can do it then I guess that's up to you. Furthermore, if those said full stops, comma's and closed speech marks makes her standard of work 'different' to what the teacher expected, then I'd say sack the teacher.

@Littlemissgreen. Love, love, love that outline. For essay's if dd's mind is a bit blank, I'll remind her of top, middle and bottom. Top - set the scene, middle - what happened, bottom - how did it conclude/end.

I will definitely not leave her with her head in the skies, her mind in a pickle and say, well that's the teachers issue or, let the teacher teach you. For further inspiration I will share what has worked for me in the past. dd is a top student in every subject (but art), so I certainly have zero intention of stopping what's clearly working. Nonetheless, I say all that to say we all have different parenting styles. It's the beauty of the world we're living in.

DS gets 'expected effort, expected outcome" for most of his Y7 homeworks. He had been tending to do the minimum required. At parents evening I was told that they could tell from his classwork discussion that he knows a lot more than he ever writes down and he could be getting excellent effort/outcome.
So since then, when he has a homework, we go through it together first. He tells me the way he would tackle it, and then I explain how I think he could do it better. He has issues here that being autistic he will do exactly what he is told to do.
e.g. if he was told to write how a natural disaster affected an area he would just write a few lines about what the effects were. I would explain that what the teacher really means is write a couple of lines about what natural disasters are, write a couple of lines about which natural disaster you are going to talk about and then write the effects. As a bullet point list of affects without even naming the disaster isn't much use to the reader.
Then I leave him to it, but remind him he is looking for 30mins work - probably 10mins research and 20mins writing.