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Saturday, May 11, 2013

When your 4 year old melt's down over pre-school math

Assignment: addition worksheet

Teach the concept of 4 + 2 by drawing 4 bubbles and 2 bubbles so she can count them all and reach 6, frustration starts but she get's it right.

Teach 3 + 7, she gets to 10 but tries to write a 3.  Asks me to white out the mistake and then writes the 10.  Frustration level higher.

Teach 4 + 5, she gets to 9, but writes a P.  I tell her she wrote the number wrong and she melts down. 


She's a perfectionist and hates making mistakes.  She likes it when I use white out over a mistake but it's hard to write over white out so I cut out a piece of paper and cover the P.  I open up her work book and ask her to practice writing the 9.  She does it perfectly.  I give her a chocolate chip to help encourage her.  We go back to the homework page and she writes another P.  I can't figure out how to get her to understand that she's writing the line on the wrong side of the circle.  She's frustrated that I keep telling her it's wrong. 

We go back to the work book to practice more 9's.  She melts down again, extreme crying, screaming "I can't do it".  This time I try praying over her angry spirit because she also says she's very angry with me, after the prayer I tell her she's stuck with me all weekend and we are going to keep working at this until we get it right.  She stays mad for a few more minutes and finally calms down.  She writes several more 9's.  So we move back to the homework page and she writes another P!  I cut and paste another piece of white paper over this P. 

Stop, get pulled to the TV by Sam to put on another show.

Come back and after a short discussion about not getting more chocolate because she needs to learn to write the 9 correctly she writes a bunch of 9's.  We move back to her homework page and she writes another P!  This time I just white out the line on the left of the circle and tell her to put the line on the other side.  She does.  I ask her to complete the circle part of the 9 and she just writes another 9.  We proceed with the rest of the homework page with no issues.


This process took one hour.  I forgot to give her chocolate at the end and she didn't remind me.  I'm not sure this was an effective learning tool anyway.  This lesson is the reason I will probably never try to home school.  I don't think I can handle this every day and she doesn't do this at school, only with me.

After the homework pages we move onto the things she really adores, painting, drawing, anything artistic.  Sigh!  She is the product of 2 artist parents!




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