Winning long term assignments are those that can be easily broken down into smaller short term assignments. For example, this summer my 7th grader was required to do a book report on To Kill a Mockingbird. Ordinarily, he hates doing book reports and has a very difficult time organizing his thoughts and writing cohesive paragraphs explaining his thoughts and ideas. This assignment was different. The tasks were varied and reqired a bit of imagination and thought. It was easy to break the assignment into shorter segments, so the asssignment did not become tiresome. Here's how it was broken down.
Part I - Setting - write a paragraph for each:
Main characters
Where/when the story took place
Major events
Conflicts/problems
Part II - Draw a picture of your favorite scene and tell why it was your favorite scene
Part III - Write three reviews of the book from the perspective of 3 famous people
Part IV - Who was your favorite character and why?
Part V - Interview a major character of the book. Provide at least 15 questions and answers.
Another good assignment involved collecting leaves. He had to collect 30 different types of leaves from trees and identify them. He was given several weeks to do the assignment. Again, this assignment was easy to break down into smaller, short term tasks. We'd go on a family outing and make a goal of collecting and identifying 5-10 leaves from each outing. Before he knew it, he had 30 leaves.
Loser Assignments:
Look up definitions in a dictionary and write the definitions on paper. The more definitions required, the more frustrating the assignment becomes.
It's also difficult to read an entire chapter of a textbook and to answer the questions at the end of the assignment.
Long math assignments are very frustrating, especially when they involve doing the same tasks and operations over and over again or if there is a relatively short time limit to do the problems (speed tests are the worst). To give you an example, at the beginning of the year, in a math assessment, my son had to do five pages of problems. There were about 50 problems in all and he was given an hour to do the assessment. He completely failed the assessment, even though he is above grade level for math and the assessment targeted grade level and below grade level math skills. At my urging, the teacher retested him. The teacher gave him 10 higher level problems, told him to take his time, and sent him to a classroom not in use. My son did all of the problems correctly within a reasonable amount of time.
One other thing comes to mind. Last year, in 6th grade, my son read 4 books during the course of the school year--one each quarter. Each book was followed by a major project. He absolutely hated English. The books weren't very interesting to him to begin with (One was Journey to Topaz. I can't remember the others.) so spending an entire quarter on each book was really painful. This year, he is reading 1 book each month (Helen Keller, Othello: A Novel, Catherine Called Birdy so far) and is enjoying English much more. I think it is because he doesn't have time to become bored with the stories or characters and the books have a variety of themes, characters, etc.
Anyway, I hope this was of help to you. Good luck with your presentation.
LJ
