DS aged 8 is struggling a lot in school. He was doing fine last year but at the start of this school year he was very ill, spent some time in hospital and a lot of time off at home and even since returning to school has missed a number of days here and there as his immune system is very, very low and he is getting sick far more often than he ever has. He's missed roughly 1/3 of the school year and at times I can see that he's extremely worn out after a school day.
When he was out of school I used to go an pick up the work he was missing from his teacher. A lot of the time he was genuinely far too sick to do it but on his better days he worked his way through all of his missing work with no issue. He flew through his maths work, had little bother with his writing worksheets, occasionally mixed up his reading because he sometimes rushes his reading but when I'd get him to use his finger under what he was reading he could do it pretty well. His main problem was with learning spellings. At times he'd also make his own 'comics' and he has trouble sounding out a word to spell it.
He's always been more of a 'sight-reader' but I started to realise that he had very little comprehension of phonics at all. So once he was well enough I went through phonics with him. It took a bit of work to convince him because when I'd go over phonics with him he'd argue back with non-phonetic examples. (He wasn't being arsey, just genuinely baffled.) But with a lot of effort we finally had a breakthrough with it and he now gets phonics and can sound out phonetic spellings with little difficulty.
Yet at school he is struggling hugely. When he first went back, he couldn't do anything at all. Maths worksheets that he'd been doing quickly at home were coming home with him because after 20 minutes of sitting in front of them at school he hadn't been able to get through them. Then he'd sit up at the table at home and do them without bother. His English work was even worse. He could barely do any grammer worksheets. He gets all of his spellings wrong. His teacher tells me he cries at school that he just can't do it. Then at home he does them just fine.
After about a month of this he's back to getting through most of his maths at school but he still does better at home. His English work is 50/50 at school, somedays it's fine, some days it's dire. But any work at home is done quickly and correctly. He'd started to get a better at school but in the last few weeks his school work is getting worse again.
On the one hand, I accept that he is recovering from an illness that his doctors have told me will take at least 6 months for him to fully recover from even if he doesn't relapse. And that he missed so much of the start of the school year and is still occasionally missing days, that he's struggling to actually get into the swing of things. On the other hand, I really don't want him to form poor habits. He needs to be able to do the work he is capable of in school. So I'm worried about the backslide.
The last issue I have is that I've realised in the last few weeks that his class has become very competitive academically. DS has told me that he is the dumb one out of all of his class. And when I talked to the teacher about it, I've discovered that they do tests at the end of every week and that they are told their results in order of how they did, so DS and all of the class know how badly he is doing. That there is a constant threat of being moved down a class hanging over them if they don't do better. And I know my DS, if he feels like he is constantly failing he tells himself he doesn't care and he stops trying. Except he really does care and it's eating him up. I had him crying in my arms a few weeks ago about how he didn't realise he was so stupid and all because of work that he couldn't do at school but once I calmed him down and sat down to help him with, he did easily without any help at all.
I'm really, really worried about how to help him now. He can do the work but can't/won't do it at school.