questions about helping with homework

[shirono]

I know, I know, I'm not a parent. However, considering I am 18 years old and have an 11 year old sister I feel a bit like a 3rd parent most of the time. It's quite scary how "adult" I sound when dealing with her...the more I age the more I sound like my mother *shiver*

My sister is in the 6th grade and I feel that she is pretty intelligent, I help her with her homework on occasion and usually she is just fine with taking my advice. My whole family is pretty cerebral, but my brother, my sister and I have always excelled pretty well in writing and reading, but arithmetic was always a bit harder for us. I usually only have to give her a little push with her reading comp. or a topic sentence for a writing prompt, but when it comes to math she just won't listen to me.

Tonight she was having trouble with LCM (lowest common multiple) and asked for help finding the LCM of 7 and 11...which is 77 obviously. I tried to explain to her along with my dad how to find it, but she continued to insist that 1 has to be a part of the answer. When we told her that was wrong and tried to explain why she started crying and telling us that we were "just making it harder for her". We left her to do it wrong and we hope her teacher will correct her tomorrow, because if you learn it wrong the first time it's hard to re-learn later.

Anyone have any advice for how to get her to see reason and realize that a H.S. senior and a former Science teacher actually do know what they are talking about when it comes to 6th grade math? Do you ever have to deal with this with your own kids?

 

[GolfingMom]

Yes. And my kiddo is in first grade He insists he knows more than us when it comes to certain subjects I take the time and talk him through it and re-explain it (since HW is to reinforce what they learned in class) and it usually clicks. I then give the explanation of how DH and I are older and we've gone through school etc and we know what we're talking about.
Do you think she's getting Greatest Common Factor confused with LCM?

 

[shirono]

Yes. And my kiddo is in first grade He insists he knows more than us when it comes to certain subjects I take the time and talk him through it and re-explain it (since HW is to reinforce what they learned in class) and it usually clicks. I then give the explanation of how DH and I are older and we've gone through school etc and we know what we're talking about.
Do you think she's getting Greatest Common Factor confused with LCM?

I think that is probably the issue here, but she simply won't listen to me. Now that our mom is home she might listen to her.
The question asked for all the Multiples of the two numbers between 1 and 100 and she was probably thinking factoring.

 

[Neenie1]

First and foremost you are not mum, you are her sister (I say this because I have been where you are, there is 10 years between my and my youngest brother, so when I was 25 and having my first child, he was still only 15 and living at home with mum and dad ROFL) Growing up I did help a lot with homework, and he would NEVER listen to me like he would to mum and dad.

Good luck with it, at least you are trying to help, maybe one day she will appreciate that you do take time to help her. Also I will say that some kids need to hear it from a teacher also. Maybe if she hands it in and it gets marked wrong she will learn and maybe listen to you next time. Sometimes we all need to learn from mistakes.

 

[shirono]

lol, once she got to the second part of the assignment she couldn't do it because didn't know the process from the first part. She came to me and got me off the computer to help her. I explained the second part and then she realized that she did do the first part wrong after all

Maybe she'll listen to me the first time next time she need help.