Cutting down amount of work

[Wee Pip]

Some of the most common advice I've received from veteran homeschool moms is: "you don't need to do every problem in the book". The idea is: "if they get the concept, move on". This seemed like good advice, because some books have a tedious amount of work in them! However, this has really backfired for us!! My 8yo negotiates every single assignment and justifies why she shouldn't have to do everything according to the directions. Has anyone else had this experience? :banghead:

[mom4him]

Yup! My 8 yr old ds can be a bean with this. I try to have whatever marked off before he learns a lesson and that helps but when it becomes a stand off I simply tell him that I can errase the Xed off ones and he will 'get' to do them all. It normally takes care of the problem.

Once in a while I remind my kiddoes that I have not chosen their matterial quickly nor lightly. It is something that I have sot God about.

I guess we all want to get by with doing less if we can manage it but you can only get to so much less before you aren't doing it at all.

[shanvan]

After years of taking that approach, my DS had a hard time understanding why he was expected to do so much more writing and so many more math problems when he hit about 5th & 6th grade in his subjects. I wanted him to get ready for middle school years.

 

At one point I had the negotiation problem too. I had make consequences for even the mentioning of or questioning how much work had to be done. One consquence was I made my son copy a list of why writing out the assignments was good and how it would help him. He got the message. When feeling generous I would simply get out a teacher's edition and show him the amount of work that would be required of him by a typical school teacher. Then I would offer to arrange his workload to match! That also helped.

 

Looking back, I think I would have taken a more balanced approach and determined what I thought was a minimum of written work for the week. *Maybe* I don't know, we can always second guess ourselves and rethink and in the end, changing what we did doesn't always mean it would have worked out better.