One of my readers asked how I was able to get LuLu (queen of OCD with a capital O) to skip test questions and move on to the next one when she immediately didn’t know the answer. I’m not sure how much my actions are the direct cause of her new-found ability to do this. But here’s what I did toward that goal.

LuLu has been home with me (out of her brick & mortar public school) for a little over two years now. When she first came home, I was reeling from the shock that I was now totally responsible for my child’s education (and was mounting a due process case against the school). I seriously didn’t think our new “situation” would last more than a few weeks. When I realized that it was going to last the whole semester, I started reading about “unschooling” and the idea of giving her a chance to decompress from the mounting stress surrounding her school departure.

It was a good move. I didn’t require much from her in the way of school work, instead just did some exploratory learning with her. She was obsessed with handwriting at that point, taking FOREVER to write a sentence as she erased over and over until the letters were PERFECT. It was maddening for me and exhausting for her.

I started by letting her see me make mistakes, in my writing and otherwise. And I would leave them and/or laugh about them. I didn’t “grade” her writing, spelling or punctuation for a very long time. And when I did decide that she needed to have some correction placed back on her assignments, I did this by giving her the key and allowing her to check her own work.

These approaches were all designed to teach her that there were more than the two ends of the spectrum: “perfect” or “stupid”. She was locked into either being one or the other. Any mention of an error was sure to push her into complaining about how stupid she was.

I did not give her handwriting exercises and started working with her on keyboarding.

Then the pendulum swung the other direction. This fall/winter her handwriting has become increasingly sloppier. I had to start marking the words I couldn’t read. Since she does a lot of self-correcting, she is realizing that sometimes she can’t even read her own writing.

Timed math fact tests have been a problem in the past, too. So a wise teacher/consultant told me to give her the sheets and keep track of how many she got done within a certain time, but allow her to work the whole sheet (not stop her when time is up.) This took the pressure off. Over time, she actually asked me to time her. This same teacher/consultant was the first one to introduce the idea to LuLu that she could go faster if she skipped the ones she didn’t know and came back to them later. LuLu struggled with it, but tried it anyway, since someone other than mom suggested it.

Fast forward to this year…her virtual school actually has instruction in test-taking strategies. The very first one was to skip the problems you didn’t immediately know and come back to them later. The cumulative effect of hearing this from all these sources, plus the relaxed atmosphere where perfection was not mentioned – and amazingly, she tried it. Now she’s hooked. We talk about how she can mark the problems she doesn’t answer right away to come back to them later.

But the title of the blog might mislead you. I have by no means taught LuLu to let go in all areas of her life. Her OCD is alive and well. But, at least on this one lesson, she’s learned that letting go and moving on past her obsession can really be beneficial. She loves to chart her progress on the timed math tests and to show me proudly when she’s skipped all over a test quickly doing the questions she knows best.

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