Question:
This is a question that would ideally be answered by one of the parents of the “Timberdoodle children” or one of the children themselves. 🙂

I have read about how you organized homeschooling by giving each child their weekly assignment, then requiring any undone work to be completed during the Friday evening family time.

My husband and I are thinking of trying this, and also considering using your Cores for our 5 children, but I have one question:

How did you handle work that was done, but not done well? I have one child  who tends to do any written work as quickly as possible, thus his writing tends to be sloppy and words are misspelled (even with copywork) or answers might be wrong (with thinking skills, for instance). So his work is done, but not done well.

How did you handle work a situation like this? Did you not worry so much about how well the work was done, but just that it was completed? Did you require them to just fix the sloppy parts/misspelled words/errors? And would that be done during the Friday evening family time?

I’m trying to figure out how to help my son learn to do his work more diligently, and it seems that just having to re-do it isn’t enough of an incentive to want to do it right the first time. Ideally he will do his work for God’s glory, from the heart … that’s the goal!

I check his work on a daily basis now, but I’d prefer to move to weekly checks.

So if you can give me some more insight on how this problem was handled in your family, or any other insights, I would be very grateful.

Joy’s Answer
I don’t remember this specifically being a big issue in our family. I think that was partly because we usually checked our own work, and partly because we knew that if we did sloppy/incorrect work we would have to do additional work before we could be done. 13 years after “graduation”, I guess it’s understandable that I’m a little hazy on the details! Would it work for him to allow him to check his own work, but know he needs to do 2 additional problems for every one done wrong? That does nothing to address the heart issues but it may help him realize his laziness just doesn’t pay. Or even just having him redo his work Friday evening may prove to be a helpful incentive. I think grace would have been extended if we had misdone our work unknowingly (“OK, do it right by next Friday with the rest of your work.”) but Mom never wanted sloppiness to pay off for us.

The other question is does he know for sure that the work is sloppy or incorrect before you check it? He may just be a terrible judge of how well his work is done, or just not think about it, in which case having a simple checklist to go through before he turns in his work would help. Some people are so convinced that their work is awesome that it would take a large dose of humility to realize that there is in fact a great deal of room for improvement! Or is he one who struggles with fine-motor coordination or the visual perception of writing? In that case, you might consider allowing him to type all his written portions to see how that impacts his work quality. Some people have visual coordination difficulties that make it really quite difficult to write and what looks like sloppy work may just be a rush to get this headache off their to do list.

Assuming none of the above, I would totally agree that it may be time to find a more direct way to talk about the heart. The three books that come to mind are Do Hard Things, Don’t Waste Your Life or Created for Work. Perhaps he could work through them as a devotional with you or his dad? It could be a natural discussion starter as well as provide him context as to why you find this so important.

I hope that helps a little.