School has been a struggle since we started back after the holidays. Between my morning sickness and being busy with a million other things, I haven’t been good on keeping up with the girls’ school work (luckily they’re both already ahead!)
But they also haven’t been good about stay on task. I ask them to do their work, sometimes letting them choose what to work on, other times asking them to complete a specific task, and unless I am right there to stay on top of them, they are generally incapable of getting their work done.
Sugarplum still needs a lot of help completing her work since she isn’t a fluent reader yet, but Honeybun is often more than capable of doing her work independently but just won’t stay focused.
Honeybun started 2nd grade work in January after completing and showing a strong understanding of the 1st grade work in the fall. And all of a sudden, something happened: she’s challenged! But it’s a disaster.
She doesn’t know what to do when she doesn’t understand something right away. She shuts down, gets overwhelmed, often cries, loses control of herself, makes excuses for why she can’t do her work (my eyes are itchy, I’m too tired, it’s too cold…) and no matter how patient and gentle I am with her, it ends with both of us upset and frustrated.
I don’t expect her to breeze through the 2nd grade work as she did the 1st grade because a lot of 1st grade was review for her and she was never challenged in kindergarten or pre-k. Learning has always been easy for her and truthfully, she doesn’t know how to learn when it isn’t easy. She hasn’t yet learned how to persist, to open her mind and try to figure things out (I strongly believe this has to do with her natural lack of creativity and problem solving skills which she’s struggled with since she was tiny).
Right now, the bane of our existence is borrowing/regrouping in subtraction. She is still working on her fluency with subtraction facts and has really struggled with the concept of borrowing a 10 if she doesn’t have enough to subtract (NOTE: my generation was taught to borrow a ‘1’ but it is now taught as borrowing a 10, which actually makes much more logical sense because that is what you are actually doing, you’re adding 10 to your ones, not 1!)
It’s funny to me that she is struggling so much with borrowing because she immediately picked up on carrying in addition and declared it “the most fun math I’ve ever done!” I’m having trouble helping her translate the concepts (borrowing is the reverse of carrying) but after a week of struggle, she is finally starting to get it, thankfully!
Looking to help your little learner practice carrying in addition?
Download and print my carrying addition practice sheets that Honeybun loved!
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