I've been shortchanging DS.... best way to lengthen lessons?

[Michelle T]

After much thought, I feel that I have been shortchanging DS by not pushing him to his limit with schoolwork. He has fairly severe LD's and ADHD, and so learning is a huge challenge for him (well, just about everything is a huge challenge for him). Because of that, I've been letting him slack off, and I often think "well, that's too hard for him" and so I don't push him. And not surprisingly, he is now fairly lazy, and not at all interested in doing anything that requires actual work or thought.

Anyway, I have our curriculum and schedule set up. In several subjects, I plan on greatly increasing our daily lesson time. I know it would be too much to just announce "we are now going to do twice as much math per day as we used to", but I'm wondering how best to go about lengthening daily lessons. A minute per day? Per week? Use a timer?

Anyone else decided to greatly increase school time? How did you make the change?
Michelle T

[Sue G in PA]

My dd11 gets through her core subjects (math, grammar, spelling, handwriting, writing) in 2 hours or less each day. So, she's done by 11am most mornings. She's just very efficient. I didn't necessarily want to add "time" by having her do 2 lessons in a subject or do busywork, so I just added another subject. She does Spanish now. That adds another 1/2 hour usually. For my ds9, he takes soooo long to do his core subjects that he's rarely done by noon. I'd love to ADD subjects b/c I feel his curriculum is lacking, but getting him to work efficiently is my first order of business.

Questions: what is his current workload? Do you have all your bases covered in terms of curriculum? Is there something you could add to round it out a bit more? Is it lack of subjects or just lack of workload in each? I mean, do you make him do ENTIRE lessons or just parts of lessons b/c you think it's too demanding for him? If this is the case, I'd first work up to doing full lessons in core subjects one at a time. If it's the former...add a subject and see how it goes.

[Alana in Canada]

You say his problem is that he doesn't want to do any work requiring "actual work" or thought.

What, specifically, does that mean?

The solution may not be to pile on twice as many math lessons but perhaps to lift your standards. Are all the numbers the right way round? Is every problem correct? Is it neat?

Are his narrations done well? Are they copied neatly? Is everything spelled correctly? Should he be using the dictionary more?

The go slowly. Make him re-copy one line of his narration--or make him correct two (not ten) spelling mistakes, that sort of thing.

Does that help?