Does your child with special needs do homework?

[Eulalia]

Having a real problem with ds doing his homework. He is P3. He did it OK P1-P2 (with some protest) but this year he is refusing or saying he will only read one page (ie about 4 lines) and will write a few words. Am about to go off to the school for a discussion about this and other things. Just wanted to check with others if their SN kids were expected to do homework, particularly autistic ones. Thanks.

My stepson has CP and when at ms schoolhe was expected to do some. Not the same as the pother kids, but to his ability.

My son AS does homework but never at home he is allowed to do it at school with his lsa as cant do the bringing nasty school home with him thing, had to fight to get it but it was worth it because of the anxiety it caused him,been to see his new high school and they say its ok for him to do it there too with support staff during the day or in homework club. good luck i know the distress this causes at home

My gut reaction is that he shouldn't do homework and in fact no primary kid should. However he is terribly slow at school and the homework is a back-up. Last night was a great success as I made a visual schedule - my new key to success! It really worked - I made a picture stating how many choc buttons he would get according to number of pages read and he read them all! I also tricked him into thinking he was reading less by typing out the pages from his reading book and putting two pages onto one sheet. This also kept the visual stuff away as he is terribly distracted by the pictures in the book and can go off on a tangent talking about them.

I feel really chuffed with myself - maybe I could get a job doing this

Ds1 (6yrs old) gets the same homework as the rest of the class. His teacher last year said that if I felt it was taking too long to do then I should let her know. She said he wouldn't have to do it at school like the others who hadn't done the worksheet had to. She also recognised that writing was much harder for him than other children.

Ds1 doesn't mind reading so I don't know what the school's approach would be if he refused.

Yes. He's 6 and in mainstream. I just help him complete it in a way that he can help with, pretty much the way he does lessons at school.

yes mine does every night,about 30 minutes worth.He's 7 and in mainstream.

He said he wouldn't do any this evening because he does homework "after school" and obviously he doesn't have school on a Sunday... hmmm... gave up eventually - I don't want to do homework on a fRiday evening (I want a break as well) so maybe have to just do it 4 nights a week.

J gets homework - he's nearly eight and has just started Y3 in mainstream.

J is academically very bright - he got all 3s in his KS1 SATS and was able to take an additional Y3 paper in Maths, a year ahead of his peer class, and came third. He now has his Maths lesson with Y4 and their homework too.

Now that's fine and dandy for his academic development but school seem to be blinded by this and can't recognise the difficulties he has with focus and concentration, especially when it comes to homework. I've tried all the strategies under the sun but it takes hours to get him to do the work because he's so distractible. A 20 minute writing task will easily take two hours for J, and it will be poor quality as well. At school he'll work because everyone else is but home is home and it doesn't work for him.

As our school give out homework on Fridays for the weekend, we've recently started 'Friday night is Homework Night' and 'Friday night is Movie Night', the gist being that once he's done his homework we get to share a dvd and tea on a blanket in front of the telly (otherwise unheard of around here!). But J doesn't respond to incentive as other kids do, in fact it can put on too much pressure and make it even harder for him to perform. I still have to sit over him giving constant encouragement to get it done. Sometimes it's not very pretty.

We're battling on, but I can see in the future there'll be a need for J to do homework at school, because it impacts so much on home life. We cope right now because he gets relatively little, but jump ahead to Y5 and Y6 and it will be a very different story.

I thought i was the only one having problems with homework! Ds has just started "Learning Logs" instead of "homework" but it is the same thing under a different title really as far as ds is concerned.

He is 9 and AS/ADHD, is in MS and HATES homework! He just cannot see why he should do school work at home. Learning Logs have to be started on Mon and finished on Thursday night to hand in on Fri morning. Some parents have complained that they don't have the weekend to work on it, but whichever way round, ds still can't abide it. Even i hate homework nowadays - i may speak to the teacher about him doing it at school in future, it will make the evenings much more pleasant!

Well done Eulalia - sounds like you managed the impossible!

Well a bit of a short lived success. He did do it last night but this evening said he would only read one page and that he wanted all 16 chocolate buttons. I agree about the incentive/reward thing as it just doesn't work the same as the average child. ds just sees the 'reward' and gets fixated on it. Trouble is if we'd not had the reward system at all then at least he would have read one page. ARggh! Can't win. He did however do writing and arithmetic homework which is fine but he didn't get a reward (and didn't seem too bothered).

May try the Friday evening idea if I can face it!

Never heard of Learning Logs but don't think you can disguise homework as anything else!