I have a student that I have been working with on organizational skills. She was having difficulties getting her homework done and returned back to school. I tried the notebook thing to help her get organized and an agenda book that lists what her assignments are for the night. That worked for her for a little while. Now she is falling behind again in both the resource room and the regular classroom because her homework is not getting completed. She has various consequences for this, but they don’t seem to bother her. Any suggestions on how to help her get her homework done?
Re: organization
How do consequences teach organizational skills? Why do we as teachers tend to see the problem in this matter and most others as a lack of consequences?
This kid and others like her needs someone to help her get organized and then to stay organized. You did a great job getting her organized. I touch base with my students once a week - sometimes more - around this. I check their binders once a week at least. If they’re messy, together we go through them, throwing out what can be thrown out and punchin holes and putting away the rest in its proper space.
After a while, I see kids get better and they learn it is possible to stay organized and they don’t feel so overwhelmed with it.
You started her off right. Help her to stay on track.
Don’t know if this will help (almost sounds more like a motivation problem) but for our son we got a package of snap/close pouches, the ones that are three-hole punched on the side. There are three in the package: clear, red, and blue.
The plan was to put homework to do in the clear pouch and completed homework going back to school in the red pouch. We use the blue one for loose-leaf notebook paper.
He’s sort of subverted my plan because he insists using the clear pouch for everything going both directions and even papers after the teacher returns them, but I’m not complaining because even that has been a huge improvement. We just have to be pretty disciplined about sorting out the contents of this thing every night. At least he knows exactly where his homework is.