Would you clean about the amount of home learning DS expected to.

[JK2012]

DS nearly 8 has asd and moderate learning difficulties with one to one support. Reading at home etc has always been a struggle but over he last few months his reading has improved and he is more willing to read at home but recently the school have been sending him home 3 books per night (he has gone up a level so the books are getting longer too), he also has spellings, 1-3 sheets of home learning and his word walls.

I know that home learning is important but it’s a struggle to get it all done without him screaming at me not wanting to.

Does 3 books, spellings, Home learning sheets and a word wall too much for a child with additional needs? Or is this to be expected?

I think his teacher is expecting too much of him. His one to one support brings him out of school apologising as she is aware of the struggle that we have with this at home.

Advice?

When I say word walls. I mean he comes with a few sheets of words he needs to learn every night. Last night he had 5 laminated sheets in his book bag.

Complain** clearly cannot spell today!!

That sounds a lot and if he's struggling I'd definitely speak with the teacher.

Our DS is 8 has ADHD and suspected ASD. He has to work so hard when he's at school that by the time he gets home he's so mentally exhausted that we struggle to get him to do more. He has...
Reading book - the school expects them to read 3x a week which is just about manageable.
but varies week by week
Weekly Spellings - we find this hard to do but have found that pinning them to wall in his eyesight has helped (he must be taking them in subconsciously)
One sheet of homework - we tend to do this at the weekend, he has work aimed at his level so tends to be done quickly, we wouldn't expect him to do more than 15mins at a time though.

Aside from this there are multiple apps (maths,spelling etc...) but we don't use these much due to how he is once he gets home.

The school have been very accepting of this and have always said that they don't want homework to be a struggle, they want the children to enjoy their work and don't want to see a negative association.

That sounds like a lot of work for any child of that age.

My 8yr-old (no SN) brings home one book at a time. They have spellings (max 10 words) each week and a single worksheet (either maths or English once a week).

My DS with ASD is older now but we had similar struggles with homework. When he got home in the evenings he needed time to de-stress and wind down. His teacher said that she calculated that the homework would take the other children around 10 minutes to do (once a week) and so wouldn't expect DS to spend any more time than that on it. It didn't matter if he produced less work in that time as he was still putting in a similar amount of effort.

I would want to know what reasonable adjustments the teacher was making for DS with homework. Expecting him to get through that amount isn't at all realistic.

Worth a check if the school are sending 3 books home to read or if what's going on in my eldest's class (similar age) isn't happening where the boys are all hoarding the reading books they fancy reading next in their bags - I retrieved 13 from one kids' bag the other day when I was hearing readers... 7 from another lad's bag... another few kids had worked up to 4-5 rattling around in there - no wonder our reading book trolley was looking rather empty!

I put my foot gently down about school adding spellings into the mix for my daughter who has SN recently - I very politely reminded them that, not only did we read dilligently with her, and do all the weekly homework tasks - but we also did speech and occupational therapy homework daily and she has to work harder than her peers to stay on the same level at school and that I would do what I could in terms of the damned spellings but please not to put pressure on her when reinforcing to do them every evening as we were hitting the limits of what we could get through at home without losing her completely. They were fine with that.

We quite often do home learning sheets on the tablet which seems to make the whole process less painful and more engaging - there's an app called Snaptype (Pro for the paid version) where you can basically photograph a worksheet and then tap and type anywhere on it to complete it. Makes it a bit easier than trying to drag writing out of a tired reluctant child sometimes and the novelty of borrowing "mum's iPad" is a bit of a motivator.