This weekend was a wash for Paul.  He left a big Social Studies project to the last minute, despite us bugging him to bring it home and start working.  On Tuesday we finally resorted to the old “If you don’t bring it, we’ll go get it” which usually works.  The thought of one of us going to his school is almost always worse than what he doesn’t want to bring home.  Despite telling us that he was working on it for hours a day at school he had almost nothing done, and made very little progress of the week.  This led us to another homework weekend with Paul.

Homework weekends used to be pure hell, and then we learned about movement breaks.  Let Paul go and do his own thing for a little while has made things much better.  Naturally we need to structure the timing of his breaks, he wants to take a 15 minute break for every 5 minutes of work.  We use his screen time timer, and let take a 15 minute break every hour.  When Paul finally finished his project, he still had time to make it baseball practice.  When I told him to get ready, he told me that he wasn’t going to baseball, he was going to play video games.  I told him he needed some fresh air because he had used all of his movement breaks to play video games.

So we got to practice late, and by the time we got there Paul had forgotten that he didn’t want to go.

~Living with Paul