4th Grader Drowns in Homework!

My daughter is starting 4^th grade in a couple of weeks.  At our school, 4^th grade is the year they really pile on the homework.  And I’ve heard from other parents that this year the teachers don’t remind all the time, they just give the homework and then expect it to be turned in without a lot of prompting.  My daughter is NOT organized.  She’s a dreamer and forgets stuff all the time.  What can we do to help her succeed this year?  I want to email her teachers and let them know that she needs extra help with this, and that they should be gentle with her.  Do you have any suggestions?

Marcie, in Provo, Utah

A: Fourth grade is often the year that kids are truly shocked by what is expected of them.  There is a very worthwhile discussion about how much homework is reasonable, and how you can start a conversation at your children’s school to look at the academic research that shows that homework in elementary school usually does not improve academic achievement.

In the meantime, there is homework.  Homework offers us as parents the opportunity to prepare our kids for all the times in life where they will be asked to do something hard.

Parenting this year is all about avoiding big bald patches where we have yanked out our hair.

Marcie, it sounds like you have a good understanding of your daughter’s challenges in this area.  Now you need to give her tools, skills and motivation.  These are the keys to helping our kids adapt the blueprint they were born with to the demands of real life.  These are the keys for her succeed in the long run.  This year is a great time to start.

Tools:  Your daughter needs a central clearinghouse for EVERYTHING that is expected of her at school.  Some kind of datebook or assignment notebook in which she writes down her homework, her projects, what day she has to bring her musical instrument for band, when she needs gym clothes, which days she has hot lunch, the days of her soccer practice or art class, birthdays, obscure holidays in small countries, really EVERYTHING she wants to remember.  She can use different colors, stickers, or a pencil for it all – it’s best if she picks out the actual supplies.  This needs to be with her all day at school and come home every night.

Skills:  The skills one needs for keeping track of all this stuff are complex.  Writing it all down and remembering to look at it each day.  If you are going to contact her teachers, I suggest asking them to remind her to use this new tool.  For home, she needs to build the habit of looking at this assignment calendar and making decisions based on what she has written down.  This is TOUGH!  It will take weeks or months for this to become usual for her.   And even then, she’ll forget sometimes.

Motivation:  With luck, your dreamer already wants to succeed in school.  If not, you have to be creative.  Figure out some things she would like about being more motivated.  Perhaps she wants to start a birthday club for herself and classmates where they decorate each others’ lockers for their birthdays.  Or maybe there is an after school activity she wants to join and you’ve said she needs to stay on top of her homework for a few weeks first to prove she can handle it all.

You could just give her negative consequences if she doesn’t stay organized, but we are all more motivated for long-term change by rewards than punishments.

The trick as parents is to remember that our kids are building lifelong skills.  It will take a while, they will make strides and then slide backwards sometimes.  We are working against their developmental stage at this age when we ask them to be organized and in charge.  Some of us, like Marcie, are teaching our kids to do things contrary to their nature.  This is bound to be a rocky road.  The reason to try is that our kids will have a rockier road ahead if we don’t.

How do you handle your children’s need for organization?