Ooops, I think I may have upset Dd3's lovely teacher.

[Ineedalife]

OK, so we have history with schools and I moved Dd3 at the end of yr3. Anyway had a chat with the 2 teachers who are teaching her this year about homework, changing for PE and a couple of other things last week and I made sure they were aware of her Aspergers. She also has a passport which states that she has difficulty with some language skills.

Fast forward to this weeks homework, its more or less the same as last weeks and has 2 questions requiring the ability to understand inference. Plus a request to try last weeks inference question again.

Anyway Dd3 started to get wound up so I told her to leave it and I wrote a note to the one who teaches her literacy explaining that her Aspergers makes it difficult or impossible to be able to put herself in someone elses shoes and that this will effect her ability to answer the inference questions. I also said that I had been planning to make an appointment with the SENCO to try to get some sort of program into place to help Dd3 develop this skill.

After school he hands DP and note saying please book an appointment with the SENCO.

Actually the SENCO did warn me that some teachers in school are not as up to speed about ASD as others in a round about sort of way but I am a bit disappointed that the cracks are starting to show already.

Ho hum, I guess I will be ringing her tomorrow.

DS is rather like this with any homework, let alone the complex literacy stuff. And sometimes he genuinely can do things, but at school only i suspect by copying with appropriate real time modelling from a peer.

I would ask her lots of questions about how he manages similar activities in class time, and get a written note (mainly for your dc's benefit!) about 'how long' to try before you can stop flogging a dead horse declaring the homework complete.

Sorry pronoun reversal, meant teacher/him and your dd=she

Ineed, I have had a similar thing with ds's weekly imaginative project based homeworks and sent a letter in with this weeks as a result. It clearly explained the problems he has with producing imaginative work and why and that he had spent over two and a half hours on the last one, before I told him to stop because he was getting so distressed by it all and is only required to do an hour anyway. I said I would welcome her advice as to whether or not the approach I was using to support him was right and/or if she would rather I backed off and left him to it, how long did she suggest I leave him for before I tell him to stop.

Nothing, not even an acknowledgement of the letter in his communication book, let alone an attempt to address the problem.

I asked ds what his teacher said and he said she said "ds1, you know what you have to do for your homework this week, right?". He told her the title of the project and she said "Yes, that's it." and that was that.

Ironically, he has been able to do this week's project no problem, because it's fact-based. Last week he had the choice of imaginative or fact-based, couldn't do imaginative at all, but wanted to and was really upset that he couldn't. Chose to write about a real event, but still couldn't construct the piece of work or decide what to put in it. It took him over an hour to think of a title and select three pictures to use.

Thanks mariamma, I will ask questions about how Dd3 manages this type of work at school and I know she can be a bit Home is home and school is school ish but she was really trying with this homework.

moose I never used to get anything back from the teachers at her old school but so far have not really had cause to moan at this one.

I talked to Dd3 again tonight about the quetions as she was asking me what I wasw going to talk to the SENCO about and I tried again to explain how the inference questions rely on her being able guess what another person is thinking or make a guess from the story or to get inside someones head and see what they are thinking.
[yeah I know stupid thing to say]

Dd3 said "Well you cant do that can you because you wouldnt fit!!" LOL

Obviously I am not very good at explaining it. But it is way beyond her anyway.

We had a similar moment with ds1 tonight trying to explain 'It's just a storm in a teacup' to him. Tried my best, then Mum tried and said, "people use it to compare to situations, because if there was a storm in a teacup, it wouldn't bother anyone except the teacup - the storm would be no big deal".

To which ds1 replied, "Of course it wouldn't bother the teacup. Teacups aren't alive, they don't have feelings".

I just let ds get it wrong. So long as he writes something and retains the idea that homework needs a little attention (out of respect for the teacher if nothing else), then my job is complete.

It's not my homework, it's his, and if it's too hard for him, that's the teacher's problem. And if he tantrums and won't write, I force him to say something tangentially related to the topic which I can then scribe for him.

Back in the bag and done. And we can get on with our evening. As you can see, I don't really believe in homework for primary kids anyway. selected research to prove my point. Caitlin Moran has my favourite quote, "I don't see why kids do homework when they're just spent all day at school. I know the technical term for that, and it's overtime."

Mariamma I am not sure you will be a favourite person in the school I went to or any school where I am from. A typical day for a 9 year old involves about 3/4 hours of extra tution on top of 6 hours in school just to stay on top of homework.

I on the other hand completely agree with you, so much so that I believe that humans have got the work life balance completely wrong, it should have been 2/3 days work and rest of the time off to enjoy life, not the other way round.

OP, sorry for the hijack.

I feel the same about homework maria. Unfortunately ds gets distressed if he can't do it, mainly because he wants to be 'good' and hand in something that will get good marks.