Frustration with my oldest

[seasonalkat]

I need to find a way, somehow, of keeping E motivated. He is so anxious to get to 'more' (e.g. double digit addition) that he will not bear with us that math is a progressive animal and if you don't get the basics down, sooner or later it could bite you on the butt

Comments

[merlyn4401]

He sounds a lot like Jamie. It's tough. How do you instill a work ethic in someone?

[aelf]

He's smart, and he knows things have patterns, so he's looking for patterns that will help him get the information he wants/needs quicker. That's a good impulse!

I'd try to make things fun. If he's bored adding single digit numbers, start playing dice games. Or some of the solitaire games where you have to add the card values up in order to remove them from the board. Where you know little tricks, teach him. Especially show him where those tricks fail -- that often helps emphasize *how* the underlying system works which far too often we try to teach children by rote.

And reward the heck out of him for trying to do things he's not good at. I wish I'd learned as a child how to do that, because trying to learn how to persevere as an adult is HARD! :)

School's really not designed for the bright kid. It teaches you how to skate through.

[smokkee911]

Oh boy...if only he understood that life itself is one big looooooooong learning process that is neverending. No wait, that would probably scare the living beegeebers outta him. lol

;-)