Off the Beaten Plan

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Browsing Off the Beaten Plan blog archives for the day Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009.

Links for 2009-09-22

Busyness of a 6-year-old

HomeworkMy son is busy. And since he hasn’t got his driver’s license yet (six, not sixteen, remember), that means I’m busy as well. Between homework Monday through Thursday, studying for spelling tests, and Boy Scouts, which he has been eagerly awaiting for the last 12 months, it seems like there’s barely time to do homework, eat, and clean up in the two hours before he has to go to bed.

Play? It’s like a 4-letter word that I can’t let him do!

It’s definitely time for a schedule.

We usually get home from daycare about 5:45 in the afternoon. The first fifteen minutes is, of course, speedy trips to the bathroom, setting down bags, pulling out homework, et cetera. Busy work, and before you know it, 6:00 has arrived.

Homework

I am lucky because the daycare my son goes to offers a homework room to the school-aged kids. Now my son is supposed to go do his homework before he goes to play, and I signed a paper that says he’s supposed to do that, but the daycare isn’t enforcing it. Of course he did it the first few days – the novelty of homework made it fun. But now homework is boring, and he’s complaining that it cuts into his play time.

Well, it’s cutting into his play time at home. I’m hoping to talk to him tonight. I don’t want to offer him awards if he does his homework at daycare – it’s a requirement, not a bonus. But I do have to make it appealing for him to get him to do it there at daycare. We talked this morning a bit – no movie, no dessert, no light stick if he doesn’t get it done before I pick him up. Maybe that will work.

Boy Scouts

As I said – there haven’t been any activities that my son has begged to get into aside from Boy Scouts. So of course when the paper came home from school, we had to go to the recruitment meeting. And then we had to sign up. And last night we had our first meeting, where they gave – you guessed it – homework!

Now since he’s got homework from school Monday through Thursday, I’m not sure when to squeeze it in. I don’t want to overwhelm him, but at the same time, he wanted to do this. He’s got to do everything that goes along with it, and that means the extra homework, too. As soon as he gets back into the habit of doing his homework at school, we’ll start doing the Boy Scouts homework immediately after school. Some of it should be fun stuff, too – don’t get me wrong. But it’s still homework.

Spelling Tests

Another school item, I’m a pretty firm believer that this needs to happen every night. That’s mostly because when I was in school, I was really bad at spelling. I still am. There’s occasionally going to be a post with a completely misspelled title. Please don’t hate me.

Spelling words come home Monday, and the test is on Friday, so obviously we’ll need to study every single day so we can make sure to hammer out those really hard words, like “back” and “sack” from last week’s test.

When to do what?

Now that the biggest items are all spelled out, and I’m thinking about our super busy weekends where we drive 45 minutes to do laundry at my parent’s house, and then go to Sunday School and church from 9:00 to 11:30 on Sunday, and then possibly have a Boy Scouts event in the afternoon on one of these days, the answer is clear: homework has to be completed by Friday evening. Nobody wants to do homework on the weekends, anyway. And realistically? If we didn’t have it done by Friday evening, we probably wouldn’t have time to do it on the weekend. (Especially if last weekend is any example of how things are going to continue!)

So, homework from school at daycare sounds reasonable.

And then on Monday through Thursday, we can practice spelling words from the moment we walk in the door – putting up a bulletin board right by our back door, which is the door we come and go from most often, would be ideal. Then we could grab the list right away, and start drilling it. We could even have him rewrite the list so one copy goes on the refrigerator, and one goes in his room for him to look at before bed.

And Boy Scouts homework, when it’s not Monday evening, will happen immediately after school on Tuesday through Friday until it’s completed.

Really, this sounds very reasonable. I can’t wait to get started!