My 6 year old daughter (almost 7) is refusing to do her literacy assignments. She is in first grade. Each day we do literacy we have to listen to the assigned story on my laptop and then she is supposed to write a story. We always talk about the story and what happened and then I read her the writing prompt at least twice (because she doesn’t understand the first time) and then we talk about what she is going to say in her story.

But when it comes time for her write it down she sits there, staring at her blank paper, and crying. We attempt multiple times for her to write her story and end up spending hours of our day on one assignment that should only take a few minutes. I will ask her why she is crying and she tells me she doesn’t know what to write. I will have her tell me what she wants to write and she will tell me and I will tell her to write down exactly what she just said to me but she won’t do it.

The only way I can get her to write her story is to tell her word for word what to write and even then half of the time she still just sits there and stares at her blank paper. I am getting beyond frustrated with her at this point. We have been doing this for 5 weeks now and she has made no improvement. I am very nice and very patient with her. She never gets in trouble while doing schoolwork until today I finally told her that whining, crying, and refusing to do her work is unacceptable.

I messaged her teacher and told her what was going on and asked for advice. Her teacher said she did the same thing in class and then told me to help her I need to break it down with her (I already do), have her tell me what she wants to write (I already do), tell her to write what she said to me (I already do), and not correct anything until she is completely done (I already do that too). I am doing everything the way the teacher does it with her in class but she still won’t do her assignment. At this point I’m getting pretty upset about it. What the heck am I supposed to do about this? No matter how much I help her and how patient/nice I am she just cries and whines. I feel like I’m going insane. I also have a two year old, a dog, and a puppy to take care of. I can’t spend HOURS on one quick assignment every single day. 😭