Maz, I do hear you, trust me, BUT lol I will talk it over with the school counsellor when I hear back from her.

Mum3girls, You know I think it takes about 30 minutes now to get his homework done.
Last term, yeah 10 min max. But now its ages. Its hard to break it up as its hard to motivate him to do it in the first place & with 2 (almost 3) other little kids & dinner etc to get ready also its hard to come back to it once you stop.
DH normally does the homework with him when he comes home. DH is a bit better with him for those things. Has more patience & probably a better approach then me. But on the nights DH isn't home till 7 I try & get it done with him.
Its hard, he is home by 4.30 (if he catches the bus home, current novelty which I am sure will wear off soon enough) then home work isn't really being worked on till about 5.30 ish as really, the poor kid just walked in the door! The last thing he is interested in doing is more school work, so I am ok with him not doing it straight away.
But on the days I am helping him, its hard to keep the other little ones away so Evan can concentrate on what he is doing. They literally climb on the table etc to watch, grab his pencil etc.

With his reader. There are 3 groups in his class from what I have been told by one of the mums who helps with the reading is Evan is in lowest of the 3. So why he would be bring home more then others is beyond me. I would hate to see what the kids in the highest group get.

I am trying to set a good homework thing for him. I was bad for homework as a kid so I don;t want to be like my mum doing it for him at the last minute (Yes my mum did a whole assignment for me once in yr 6, the night before it was due. god love her)

Getting him to read the reader book thing is hard. He isn't interested AT ALL in doing that. So this is why he rushes over it & doesn't really read the pages. He even says he read it at school so why read it again?
I really don't think they are an effective way of teaching him to read. Yes ok it may be what all kids do, memorising the words that go with that page etc but I think it would be much more effective to have him making sentences with words that we can change every day. So say he still has a set selection of words each week but then rather having a simple story he will just remember, having word cards we can make into things. KWIM?

Blah.... its soooo hard being a parent of school age kids!