B after dark

When we get home each afternoon, B almost always goes to his room for 'privacy' or 'alone' time.  He uses that time to decompress.  By the time he's ready to come to the living room, I'm usually engaged in something else. 

With the older boys, I always had them do their homework as soon as school was out.  Especially in the early days of homework, they were able to do their homework almost immediately after school. They would come to my classroom and get to work.  I also had a great carrot - my classroom was the computer lab.  When they finished, they could play computer games. 

B's school gets out way after mine so by the time he gets to me, I'm ready to go home.  Many days I meet him in the parking lot and go home. 

All that to say, I haven't been great about doing homework or extra work with B.  He hasn't been great either.  Lots of times he's all used up.  He's worked hard all day to hold it together that he can't do any more.  We have had some epic meltdowns around homework.  Thankfully, he hasn't had a lot of homework and he still doesn't. 

But the time has come for B to do some work at home.  He needs to work on his addition and multiplication facts and his spelling.  Not traditional homework but extra practice.

He was not excited.  So, we worked up a system.  He still gets his alone time as soon as we get home.  Then at 7:40, we work in 5 minute increments.  5 minutes on addition, 5 minutes on multiplication, 5 minutes on spelling.  Each thing might take more than 5 minutes but he likes to think there's a time limit. 

I found B an app that would review both addition and multiplication.  I thought he'd be super excited about that.  Wrong! "I want paper.  I don't want a machine to teach me."  So, I found a website to print worksheets for him. 

So far so good.