Show Your Work!

Does your kid do something that just drives you crazy? I know, I know, you are thinking "what do you mean something? Don't you mean SOMETHINGS as in more than 1?" Yes, that to! There is one thing that Logan is doing that is literally driving me batty. I don't know if it is because he is going back to public school next year and the habit is not acceptable in school (that is another post for another day....our choice to put him back in school and it has nothing to do with me wanting or not wanting to home school still. It is what is in the best interest of Logan, but another day we will go there.....or maybe not...LOL!). Maybe it is because I can't always grade his papers correctly. Perhaps it is because he misses problems because of the bad habit. Or, maybe it shows me how freakin' OCD I am with organization and what is "proper" assignment completion. Truth be told, it must be a combo of all of the above.

So......


do you want to know what my kid is doing that is wasting so much darn time and causing him to have to redo his math? You do know that when he redoes an assignment I have to literally sit there AGAIN and make sure he does it correctly, right? Often times that mean an additional hour of school a day. DO you know what I could do in an hour?

Mop the entire downstairs

Clean all the bathrooms

Prep dinner

Dust and vacuum the whole house

Read

SCRAP!

Take a shower, do my hair and put on a full face of make-up.

These are just a few things I could do in an hour. Imagine what a kid could do in an hour? An hour is like a lifetime to them. He could be doing so much, but no. We spend another hour on the flippin' math assignment! Grrrrrrr!!!!! You would think that after...oh I don't know.... SEVEN LONG MONTHS of the same freakin' thing he would get the point, right? Wrong!

I then had to come to the realization that maybe this wasn't a "Kid" thing, but the "teacher" thing. The "teacher" being me! Yeah, this is most likely totally my lack of showing him what is needed.

Have I told you what the problem is? Logan does not show his work when he completes math problems. This leads to him getting answers wrong. I know that some things he does not have to show his work for, but the majority of it he does!

The first thing I did was gave him a blank sheet of paper and told him to write the problem, solve it, and then put the answer in the column on the side that he had numbered. Well, that went over like a fart in church -- not well! I then drew a box for each problem he had to do and he was running out of space. Finally I came up with this:

Graph paper and boxes have done the trick! Hopefully, by the time he starts school in the fall he will know how to set up his paper like this. In the meantime I am making copies of it for him to "SHOW HIS WORK ON!" Heck, I may just send him to school with a bunch of these next year so he does not fail math or drive his teacher nuts!