Thank you God
For the opportunity to teach from home. Even it it’s from the toilet. 3 days in of “routine” lessons, and certain personality traits are becoming glaringly clear. Private 2 is unnerved and stressed out by other stuff buzzing around her while she has been given a task to complete. And totally wigged when her brothers announce they are done with something she is still tackling. And highly distractable when there is any interuption of any kind. And overwhelmed when given a whole page of math, front and back, when she thinks of all the work that is yet to be done. Even if the task is simple for her. She began to cry today, just trying to explain her frustrations to me.
She pours over every letter in a practice scripture. Agonized over the turn of an ’s’, or the symmetry of her ‘w’. While her brothers just plow on, churning out the words of a 2 sentence verse. Naturally, with her being pursuant of perfection, she will not finish as quickly as her brothers. And it makes her crazy. If we decorate cookies, she designs one for an hours, and is working on it long after the boys have churned out 10 and gone off to play. We’ll work through it all, because I am on it. A major part of my job is determining what their needs are for best being able to learn. And when I think about her in a class of 25, all the different things that would be going on, the kids getting up to sharpen pencils, the hands shooting up in the air for questions, the teacher walking around helping children near her, timed quizes, the who knows the answer to (fill in the blank) and on and on and on, it just turns my stomach.
Today I was able to hold her hands, look into her huge blue teary eyes, and say we will figure this out together. There is no pressure. This is not a test. This is part of how you are created, and we will learn how to help you love learning. Thank you, God.
For the math pages, use a blank page to cover the lines below the one she is working. We have the same issue with one child and that was suggested to her and it help her focus on the few math problems that she sees and not on ‘omg what needs to get done’. And we have the distraction issues too. With distraction you don’t want to put her where you can’t see her to keep on track, but is there somewhere away from her brothers that she can do her work? Maybe closer to you at another table or desk. Just some suggestions that have worked at OUR house.
Comment by the SmockLady — March 16, 2006 @ 2:54 pm