“What did you do at school today?” I asked, for what felt like the hundredth time.
My six-year-old looked up from the car seat, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know.”
“Did you do reading groups?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you have gym?”
“I think so.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror. He was chewing on the sleeve of his jacket, watching a truck back out of a driveway. It wasn’t that he was being difficult. He genuinely seemed blank. The whole school day had disappeared somewhere between the dismissal bell and the parking lot.
At home, the same thing happened with his math worksheet. He’d done almost the entire page in class, but when I asked him to show me how he solved the first problem, he stared at the numbers like they were in a foreign language.
“You did this an hour ago,” I said, trying not to sound frustrated.
He shrugged again. “I forgot.”
I knew the feeling. I’d walked into rooms mid-task and forgotten what I was doing. But this was his whole day, his phonics lesson, his science experiment, his spelling words. It felt like he was walking around with a leaky bucket.
For a while, I worried. I wondered if he was struggling in school and didn’t want to tell me. I wondered if his teacher thought he wasn’t paying attention. I wondered if something was wrong with his memory.
Then I sat down and actually watched him do his homework one evening. His assignment was a list of five sight words. He read “the” and “and” and “was” without any trouble. But when I covered the list and asked him to spell “was” from memory, he froze.
“W-A-F?” he guessed.
We had practiced that word ten minutes earlier.
“We just did that,” I said.
He looked at me with the same blank expression I was getting used to. “I don’t remember.”
That was when I realized the problem might not be that he wasn’t learning the information. It was that he couldn’t pull it back out when he needed it. There’s a difference between knowing something and being able to recall it on demand, and at six years old, that difference is huge.
Children at this age are still developing their working memory and retrieval skills. The part of the brain that organizes memories and “searches” for them when needed isn’t fully online yet. For a kindergartner or first grader, the day is a long string of events, instructions, and new concepts. Without something to anchor those moments to, they slip away easily. That’s why “What did you do today?” gets a blank stare. It’s an enormous question. There’s no starting point. His brain doesn’t have a search bar yet.
What helps, I’ve learned, is giving him clues to hook onto.
Instead of asking, “What did you do today?” I started asking, “What was the funniest thing that happened at lunch?”
Still a shrug, sometimes. So I tried more specific questions: “Did anyone fall off the monkey bars?” “What color marker did you use in art?” “Was your teacher wearing her striped dress today?”
The striped dress question worked. He remembered the dress. Then he remembered that the class had made a graph about favorite ice cream flavors. That led to a story about a kid who said pickles were a flavor, which led to a debate about whether pickles count as ice cream, and suddenly he was talking. I don’t think he could have told me any of that if I’d stuck with the original question. The right question acted like a key.
I also stopped asking him to remember his day in the middle of the chaos of pickup. The transition from school to home requires a huge amount of mental shifting. Instead, I wait until dinner or bedtime, when he’s settled. Sometimes the memories come out then, not because he tried to remember, but because something I said triggered a connection.
The same principle applies to homework.
We changed how we practiced sight words. Instead of doing a full page and then moving on, we do shorter bursts with lots of repetition, but not the kind where I say the answer and he repeats it. That felt helpful, but it wasn’t teaching him to retrieve the word on his own. It was teaching him to echo me.
Now we use what his teacher called “retrieval practice,” which sounds more complicated than it is. I show him a word, we say it together, we trace it with a finger, we build it with magnetic letters. Then I cover it up and ask, “Can you find the word ‘was’ on this page?” or “How do you spell ‘was’ without looking?”
If he gets it wrong, we don’t scold. We just look at the word again, say it, and try again a minute later. The point is to give his brain practice digging the word back out, not just seeing it in front of him. The first week, it felt like we were starting over every single night. By the second week, the words were sticking a little longer. Not all of them, and not perfectly, but enough to show me that the strategy was working.
I also started using his schoolwork as a conversation starter rather than a quiz. When he brings a worksheet home, I don’t say, “Did you understand this?” I say, “Show me which part was the trickiest.” That invites him to point to a problem and tell me what made it confusing. Sometimes he can’t explain, but just pointing and talking it through helps him reconnect to the lesson. It’s not really about the worksheet. It’s about giving him a way to pull the memory back out.
The hardest part has been getting comfortable with silence.
I used to fill every pause with another question. “Was it fun? Was it hard? Did you like it?” That just made things worse. He’d get overwhelmed and shut down. Now I try to sit with the quiet. I’ll ask one question and then wait, even if that means staring at him while he chews a piece of chicken and looks at the ceiling for thirty seconds. Sometimes the answer comes. Sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay.
I’ve also learned to accept that not every day is going to be a detailed recap. I know more about what he ate for lunch on some days than what he learned in math. He can tell me if the class guinea pig was acting weird, but not which letter sounds he practiced. It’s not always what I want to hear, but it tells me he’s paying attention to the world around him, just not in the way I expected.
We’re still figuring this out. Some evenings end with me feeling like I’m pulling teeth to get a single sentence out of him. Other nights, he’ll look up from his dinner and announce, completely out of nowhere, that the fire alarm went off during art and everyone had to line up outside. The memory comes, but it comes on his timeline, not mine.
If you have a six-year-old like this, know that it’s common. Their brains are busy building the pathways they’ll need later, but right now, the exit ramps are still under construction. That doesn’t mean they aren’t learning. It just means getting the information back out sometimes requires a detour.
I’ve started leaving more room for those detours. We keep the crayon drawings and the crumpled note his teacher sent home even after we’ve read them, because he can look at them later and remember what happened. We talk about the day in the car, at dinner, and before bed, not because I expect an answer every time, but because sometimes the third or fourth attempt is the one that works.
He still shrugs a lot. I still wonder if I’m doing enough. But the other night, he looked up from his snack and said, “Mom, remember when we planted the bean seed? It grew two leaves today.”
I hadn’t asked. He had remembered on his own.
The teacher had sent a photo earlier that week, and I’d shown it to him without making a big deal. He didn’t recall it at first. But later, when his brain was ready, the memory surfaced on its own. I’m learning to trust that process a little more.
We still have plenty of blank looks and forgotten spelling words. I don’t think that changes overnight. But I’ve stopped reading those blank looks as failure. They’re just part of how his mind works for now. Somewhere underneath them, the day is still there. It just takes the right moment, and the right question, to bring it out.
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