True Confessions and 3rd Grade Spelling Homework

April 28, 2010

True Confessions and 3rd Grade Spelling Homework

My third grader loves homework. He thrives on completing his assignments perfectly and takes pride in his work. I'm very proud of him considering he has some special needs that make completing his homework take longer than 'the average child'. And, though he has special needs - he is also a very typical 9 year old boy. He loves his video games, books, movies and the computer and tries to put off doing his homework until the last possible minute. In the beginning of the school year, we had a good routine established.

Snack, homework, playtime, dinner, playtime, bed.

But, as the year unfolded - things relaxed and the routine shifted.

Snack, playtime, dinner, homework, playtime, bed.

And here we are in April and the schedule somehow became

Snack, playtime, dinner, playtime, homework, bed.

Homework has moved itself from the first thing my son did when he came home from school (after snack), to the last thing he does before bed. Now, don't get me wrong - he still loves homework. It just seems that homework has gotten pushed off until the last thing and he is using it as a stalling technique. for going to bed later and later. I hold myself at fault for this as well since I let the homework time slip later and later.

After a particularly draining day, I was about to put my son to bed when I realized he had completely skipped doing his homework. As he climbed the ladder to his loft bed he announced "We have homework". Not - "I have homework", "We". I was exhausted and off we went to the kitchen where I found his spelling homework uncompleted in his spelling folder. Sigh. My son was falling asleep at the table and insistent that he do his homework before bed instead of in the morning before school as I suggested we could do. The assignment consisted of cutting out 25 words and pasting them in alphabetical order on a grid. I knew from past weeks this particular spelling task would take him close to an hour.

I had a headache, I was tired, my kid was tired. And in that instant - I did a horrible thing.

I got out the scissors and I cut them out lickety split. I handed my son the Elmer's glue stick and told him to spread glue on the grid. I took the cut-up words and lined 'em up in alphabetical order. He grabbed them one by one and he pasted them in place on the grid in order. Voila! Homework was done in record time (because I did it for him) and he went to bed. I felt guilty but relieved. I went about my business with the resolution that we needed to move homework to an earlier spot in the line-up so I would be able to sleep at night and not feel like the cheater I did. I vowed I'd never do my kids work for them, and yet that was pretty much exactly what I did (aside from the glue part). I was pretty mad at myself and contemplated whether I should rat myself out to my son's teacher with a sticky note.

About an hour after my son had gone to bed I heard something stirring. My son came walking out into the living room and asked me, "Did you make a mistake?" He went into his backpack and pulled out his (our) work. He pointed out two of the words that were incorrectly ordered. The mistakes meant that everything needed to be cut out and re-glued. I thought about sending him back to bed and fixing it but decided against it. I gave him a fresh sheet of copy paper, the glue stick and scissors. I left him alone in the kitchen while he cut out, re-ordered, and glued the words in proper alphabetical order from start to finish into a grid.

It took him about half an hour, but he did it himself.

New Jersey Moms Blog post by MaryTara. MT blogs her adventures in parenting two beautiful children on the Jersey Shore, life with autism & without it, the gluten & casein free diet, and vaccination choice issues at The Bon Bon Gazette and raising a child with amblyopia at Adventures in Amblyopia.