My daughter's teachers have been suggesting that we give her the opportunity to choose her own schoolwork as a way of making her more willing to engage with school. We've been trying to give her a half dozen or so choices in a variety of subjects each morning in the hopes that something will spark her interest.
So far this isn't working very well. She'll do plenty of reading, but getting her to do math or writing is nearly impossible. This afternoon I gave her at least a dozen ideas for writing and she refused all of them. I think her biggest issue is that she's not a strong speller and she is very self-conscious about it. Her perfectionism really works against her when she writes. We try to reassure her that every kid her age has trouble with spelling and that we can read what she writes just fine, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
And math is either too easy or too hard or too boring, which doesn't leave a lot of room to maneuver.
Occasionally she'll do art projects with my mom over FaceTime, but even that has been getting harder to convince her to do lately.
We have amazing support from the schools - her teacher is fantastic and there's a behavior specialist who's been working with us to come up with strategies to motivate her to do some of the work.
As with so many things in this time, I feel guilty feeling so overwhelmed and discouraged - we have a kid who's placing above grade level in almost every subject, we have teachers and support people ready and eager to help us, we have a stable and supportive home environment - but it's still really hard. I can't imagine what people with less supportive school systems, less stable home lives, trickier income situations, etc must be going through with their kids.