should children be allowed to study alone

I agree. Children that have a learning disability tend not to study on their own. Howver, If you are engaged in a particular subject, they focus more on the subject at hand. Because I’m new at this, there maybe more ways in getting children to study on their own. If so, please give me some pointers.

If children need a parent to supervise their work, they should be supervised in my opinion. Otherwise they do their work poorly.

Teachers should give work that is appropriate to a child’s stage of development. If a child needs great supervision with their work, the work assigned may be poorly chosen.

As a parent, I have been wrestling with this issue for years. I have a friend who spends hours studying with her daughter. She forces her daughter to make up cards, with words on one and the definitions on the other so she can match them up. She goes over and over them, as well as other sections on the study guide. They fight and yell and scream. She says her daughter has no idea how to study. She also says her daughter forgets something five minutes after they go over it.

My daughter also has no idea how to study. 3rd and 4th grade were a nightmare. She’s now in 5th grade. She goes to an easier school than my friend’s daughter, so they are just getting going with social studies and science. My daughter has difficulties with written language and spelling, although the school refused to officially classify her (another story). They qualified her for special ed. under ED (another long story). I hate the idea of getting back into the kind of fighting with my daughter that my friend is going through with her daughter. People keep telling her to “just let her daughter fail” and not give her all the help. My friend says she just can’t bring herself to do it. She is not one to let her daughter fail and she told me she’s afraid that the teachers will think it is her fault her daughter is failing. I’m not sure I can bring myself to do it, either.

Another problem I’m struggling with is how I can help my children to care about school. All they care about is playing with their friends. I’m sure my 2nd grader could be doing better. I’m not always convinced about my 5th grader as she has always struggled with school.

Sorry this is so long. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks,

Margo

is homeschooling. Currently my daughter goes to a small public charter school part-time (3 hours a day including lunch/recess), and we homeschool all academic subjects. This school is family-oriented, believing time in school is for academics and time at home is for family, so we do not have to contend with homework from school. If homework were assigned (more than 20 minutes a day), I would be down at the school arranging for no homework or a 20-minute limit. If this were impossible, I would go back to homeschooling full-time while I shopped around for another school. (My daughter likes the sense of belonging to a community, and spending social time every day with the same children — and other adults than her parents — which is why she is in school part-time.)

We homeschool academics because I found that my daughter learns next to nothing in a classroom setting, even though she tries hard to pay attention and the teachers are decent. We could not homeschool if we fought all the time.

One of the things that helps us is keeping lessons short. All of our academic lessons are either 10 minutes or 20 minutes long. We can do this because I choose curriculum materials that are well-suited to my daughter’s global learning style — no fluff, not too much detail, explanation of concept first followed by a few practice problems. When my daughter knows the lesson is no more than 10 or 20 minutes, she is able to pay attention much better and this results in much higher retention. It also makes it easier for me to keep the lesson upbeat and positive. (I should mention that my husband does most of the math with her, one 40-minute stint per night, but he introduces lots of games and puzzles and tailors it to her mood and fatigue level.)

My daughter is in 5th grade and would rather play than study. We used to break every 20 minutes. Over time, she has gotten used to our schedule and now sometimes will work an hour or more before taking a break. Almost all of our time is one-on-one because she still needs me to provide direction and almost continuous feedback and encouragement. She is gradually becoming more self-directed (can do her Spanish software or piano practice for 20 minutes without me), but she will be slower than many to develop independence in her studies. Meanwhile, I help her model reasonable study habits and pave the way for learning — making it as efficient as possible for her. Not counting art classes, piano lessons and practice, physical education, theatre group, etc. we spend a total of perhaps 12 to 15 hours a week on academics. With this schedule (during the summer we cut back to about 8 hours a week), my daughter has been able to gradually catch up with her classmates and in some ways has started to pull ahead academically.

Every family needs to find a personal solution. This is what is working for us.

Mary

I see a difference between helping a child “study” for school and planning and carrying out currriculum independent of school. I’ve seen some parents “push” their children too and try to teach their children to read at very early ages etc. etc. I reserve judgement about that. I didn’t do it with my own children but to each their own.

Helping a child “study” for homework is another matter. Many parents want o need their children to be independent in the evenings. To my observation as a teacher and as a parent, not all children are ready to be independent with their school work. So the child does poorly in school. To me, as a parent, I stepped in and helped my son “study” and do his homework. Without my help, he would not have been able to stick to the task of his nightly work. Over the years, he did become more independent. He matured at a pace slower than his classmates but I never understood why he should punished in school or receive bad grades because he was developing more slowly than his classmates. We’re each “programmed” differently.

These days it’s also true that homework is being assigned to younger and younger children. My son isn’t the only one out there who can’t do his work independently. My teaching colleagues tell parents NOT to help with homework under any circumstances. That makes no sense to me. Failing teaches a child nothing but failure and I encourage my parents to supervise nightly homework if they possibly can.

When I was a child, 2nd grade was something to look forward to. We learned but we also played and had fun. Modern education is focused on having children pass standardized tests and, not surprisingly, children have lost interest in school.

If though your 5th grader has learning differences, keep an eye on your 2nd grader for the same. To do “better” in 2nd grade should be a matter of reading well, spelling well, writing well and paying attention well. If a child has trouble with those tasks, they can have even as young as the 2nd grade.

Good luck.

Well, I have a third grade LD son who because of our intervention is now in the bottom third of the class. Last year he couldn’t read at all—and wasn’t even in the range of the class. He can read grade level material but not easily.

He is doing OK this year, with some tests being read to him. He is learning science and social studies (got an 83 on first science test). He is not doing this alone. We also are not fighting.

I would never use flash cards for my son. He has memory deficits and something like that would never work. I try to make connections between the material he has to learn and what he already knows. I explained customs to him by reminding him about our friends from Iceland who put shoes in their windows for St. Nick. He has been learning the continents. We talked a lot about them—our babysitter is from South America, my husband’s aunt lives in Australia, most of the slaves came from Africa. Then we bought a world map at a teacher store. He loved it and pinned it up in his room. We went over its several times. I then had him make pictures to remind himself of each of the continents.

We also read his text book to him several times and talk about it. (He also reads it to us once but it is tough for him and sometimes he spends his energy on decoding rather than comprehending). We work hard at keeping his interest. He struggles so much that without it, he would have no motivation to learn.

Now we are learning third grade with him (do you want to know what the traits of mammals are) and it is time consuming but it hasn’t been that painful. I think the flash card approach may work with a nonld child (I remember making them up) but an awful lot of LD children have memory deficits. Straight memorization doesn’t work or if it does, the benefits are very short term.

Beth