"Grades"?

[obiandelismom]

My 5yo ds is very into doing "school work", which at this point mostly consists of him writing out some letters and numbers on ruled paper, and then asking me for a grade. (He does this on his own initiative - I don't tell him to do "school work".) I'm not sure how to respond to the grade request, honestly. I've tried treating it like a game, and giving him silly grades ("Oh yes, this is Q-plus work!" or even "Mmm. Looks like someone got himself a spinach today!"), but he just furrows his brow and says, "No, mom - is it an 'A' or an 'A+'?" One time he brought me a paper with the number 3 written on it over and over - backwards. Without thinking, I pointed out the fact that it was backwards. He immediately burst into tears! I promise I am not standing over him with a switch, telling him to do perfect papers - this is all at his insistance...

The other thing I have tried is to ask him what HE thinks his grade should be. He always says he doesn't know. So since the horrible backwards-3 episode, I've just been telling him that all his papers are A+. Except for the ones that are A++++. But something doesn't sit right with me, and I was wondering if any of you wise moms have any other ideas? Or is this just his way of "playing school", and I should just go along with it til some other weird phase comes along?

[yonit]

Hmm...I think I would just keep it light and playful as you have been. My girls don't really know what grades are so we don't really have that problem. However, we do have the perfectionist problem -so we have spent a lot of time discussing how "Mistakes are Opportunities to Learn". They now finish that sentence for me whenever I say "Mistakes are..."

The most I have ever done with them is draw a smiley face on my daughter's spelling paper. But that is actually part of the program - Sequential Spelling.

Anyway, with my older son -and he was around 9-10 when this came up, so much older - we talked about how grades just weren't important at this stage of his homeschooling. Grades were a way to compare you to your classmates, and really meant absolulutely nothing in hs'ing. I was more concerned that he was learning and enjoying the material and therefore grades were meaningless. He was fine with that - until high school age, when he needed transcripts. So, then he got them but even he said "These are basically meaningless but will make colleges happy"

[Roar]

Some kids really like to have a sense of accomplishment in what they do or some validation for their efforts. When my son found out about spelling tests (he's naturally a good speller) he was all over me about why I'd denied him this great pleasure in life. Okay, I printed out a list of spelling words off the Internet and gave him quizzes for a week or two until it was out of his system.

So, while I understand your discomfort with the grade aspect, I'd look at that as the underlying motivation and try to build in some ways for him to get that need met. Maybe he'd like a sheet of stickers from the dollar store and he could put one on himself when he finishes a page. Or he could make a chart and fill in the letters he's learned or whatever kind of visual marker he'd like to see his progress.

[eilonwy]

In one of the homeschooling books that I read (I can't for the life of me remember which one) the author talks about a boy who does something similar-- he finishes a paper and asks his mother, "Where's my 'A'?" Mom, thinking she's obliging, makes a big red "A" at the top of his paper and the kid says, "What did you do that for? You ruined it!" (This was a child who had never been to school, iirc.) They ended up making a bunch of A's out of paper and hanging them from the ceiling on strings. Anyway, there were several more suggestions about the obsession with grades/validation that many children (homeschooled or otherwise) go through.

I wish I could remember which book it was. I want to say that it was one of the Linda Dobson ones, but I'm not sure...