ADHD

The Individual Learning Plan is a really good idea. My son was diagnosed with ADHD. He's a smart kid but likes to be active and is easily bored.

The problem is that he would do homework and forget to turn it in or not write down his assignments and not be able to tell us what homework was due or what tests were coming up.

The school wants him to be responsible for writing down in his agenda what he needs to do each day for each class. That's great. But when he forgets to write it down and gets a zero for misssing an assignment, there is not much you can do as a parent. You punish, threaten, reward, whatever. But that's just his disconnect.

If you look at his grades online, you are always playing catchup.

Without an ILP, the best the teachers would agree to is that they would sign his agenda to indicate he had filled it out correctly. IF he brought it up to them.

Well, he would do fine for a while then be missing signatures and you'd ask and he'd say the teacher was out that day or there was no homework so he didn't bring it up. Always a struggle.

So if you have a plan that -- for example -- requires the teacher to inform the parents somehow of the assignments due and test schedule, you can deal with your kid from a position of knowledge, instead of trusting that he's really done the thing he's worst at doing.

Oh, and one other frustrating thing, is he tended to do poorly in the really easy classes because he'd get bored in them and just tune out that some work was required. And middle and high school probably have more challenges that way than grade school.

Good luck.

 

Contrary to popular conception, some large percentage of high school dropouts are bored gifted kids.

 

What Type said. At this point you really need a professional diagnosis. If you trust your pediatrician
set up a consult with them and get a referral.

If he has ADD baseball is not the sport for him. It sounds like you like baseball and he may just not
want to disappoint you. It sounds dangerous if he is not paying attention to the pitcher. You don't want him to get drilled. How does he interact with teammates? How do they act towards him?

 

I looked up that book on Amazon. Looks great so I ordered it.

 

You'll enjoy it, Buck, because you like science.

A scientist co-wrote it, and it's written from that perspective.