Wow! Can you believe that it is already February? We only have a few months left for our 6th grade school year and it has been a very different year for us. Today, I’d like to explore all the issues and victories we have faced and how we addressed and compensated each one by implementing a behavior modification plan and a few other simple changes.
Long Days…
In the past years, we would have some long days, but for the most part they were pretty sporadic. Generally, they would often come on days where we had a lot of interruptions or Noah had a lot of work that required a tremendous amount of writing.
However, this year something drastically changed. I don’t find fault in the curriculum for this by any means. In fact, this year I have grown to love the curriculum even greater. Honestly, I believed our long days have developed due to internal changes happening in Noah’s body. He’s at that age where hormones are going all over the place, so we are having to learn to compensate and administer new techniques.
We generally start school at 8 a.m. and could reasonably be done by 1 or 2 p.m. However, our school days for many weeks were dragging out to 8 to 10 p.m. I felt like I was LOSING MY MIND. For real, it was really hard. I spent a lot of time talking to Jesus. All my housework was backing up, I had no time to do anything else because I couldn’t leave the schoolroom or no work would get done. Something had to be done!!!
Changes to End Long Days
Behavior Modification Plan
My background is in mental health and social work and I weirdly LOVE creating behavioral modification programs. So after great prayer, I began to examine what needed to take place. The Lord reminded me I have these skills and talents and they can be put to use in our own homeschool, so that’s exactly what I began to do.
Noah thrives on verbal praise and tangible rewards. Therefore, I knew he needed those aspects to be part of his plan. The key here is knowing what your child responds to for encouragement or to promote change. Each child is different.
Our issues at hand was losing focus which extended the work day to unhealthy and stressful time frames. Our goal was to return to a healthy and less stressful work day by getting the work done in a more reasonable time frame. But how???
The Plan
The actual plan itself involved tools of a timer, tangible rewards, sticker, verbal reminders, working more together, and reviewing the work prior to starting to set time goals.
First, we would pull out the PACE (his workbook) for a particular subject that he was going to be working on. Then, together we would review the work to be completed in that single subject. We would set a time goal and then set the timer to that time. Noah would begin his work. Some work he did solely on his own and other work we would discuss it and review it and then he’d complete it on his own. Through out his time working, if I heard things being “still” such as no pencil writing or eyes wondering off into space then I would say something like, “stay focus, Noah, you are doing good, keep working.” This would give him a cue to refocus, plus encouragement that he is doing a good job and to keep at it.
If he would complete the work before the timer would go off then he gets a sticker. Once he gets 50 stickers, he gets to pick a prize out of a prize box of goodies of things I know he would like to have. If he doesn’t get his work done before the timer then we evaluate what happened and then adjust for next time. This is our starting point for his behavioral modification program.
This program will assist him in training his brain to refocus and showing him that he is able to get the work done in a reasonable time. In return, he will get natural consequences that come along such as having time to do other things that he loves to do.
Progress
So far, I have seen great improvements to our days when we are able to fully implement this program. I play a huge part to making sure this happens. I have to leave my phone outside the schoolroom and ensure that my level of being a distraction is minimal.
Most days we are finishing school between 1 pm and 3 pm, which is a huge improvement from 8 to 10 pm as before. We even have some days that we finish up all our work right at lunch time. We cherish those days and take full advantage of getting other things completed that need to be done during that time.
Additional Changes
In addition to adding the behavioral modification, we have also modified how we implement breaks and grading.
Breaks
Our rule for breaks has generally been that after every two subjects, he will get a 5-minute break to do whatever he likes, except electronics. However, this brought roadblocks to his attention and focus level. After breaks, it was hard to draw him back in to stay focus. If he played the piano then he would continue thinking about the song and how to change or perfect it. If he played with toys, then his focus would continue to think about what he could do next with them. It was a cycle that ran a continuum, no matter the activity.
Again, something had to be done. This time I implemented a rule that he could not leave the schoolroom. We found some cds that we use to play when he was in younger grades and we use them during the breaks to dance around and be silly. The laughter and movement does wonders for the brain chemistry. After the break, he immediately gets back to work and focus is greatly improved.
Grading
In my video, How I Set Up and Store A.C.E., I briefly talked about how I grade Noah’s work. This year, we slowly made a change and I’m loving it and so is he.
Noah completes his work for the day and every time he comes to a bar at the bottom of a page that tells him to stop and grade certain pages, he then stops and comes to the grade book which is beside me at my desk. He leaves his pencil at his desk. He brings his work and uses a read pen and places a red “x” beside any incorrect work. He then takes the work back to his desk and corrects it and then rechecks it with the score key at my desk. I can clearly oversee him and ensure he is doing the grading correctly.
He grades everyday work and check-ups, while we grade self-tests together and he is still able to correct those. However, I grade his test and no revisions are allowed on those. I will still continue to do a recheck to review his graded work about once a week to make sure he has graded everything accurately. I feel this has helped us both out tremendously.
Wrapping it all Up…
Overall, I feel that we both have learned a lot this year at how to “roll with the punches.” Our activity outside the house has been limited and I know this has played a part in attention issues as well.
I’d love to hear how your school year is going and if you have had to make any changes. Also, if you’d like to know all the curriculum that we are using this school year then don’t forget to check out my blog post OUR 6TH GRADE HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM: 2020-2021.
Be Encouraged. You can do this!! – Phil. 4:13
