Ask Sherrin Blog

There are many questions that parents ask about homework for their children: What is the purpose of homework? How long should my child spend each night on homework? How will I know if homework is stressing my child? How much should I help my child with their homework? Will the Fruition Homework Tips help homework be drama free? Shouldn’t children come home to play? Fruition will shed light on the homework debate and we will capture some leading Australian educators’ views and insights.

In this Article “Your child’s homework – a help or a hindrance” Fruition will discuss the benefits of homework for your child, some disadvantages of homework for your child, the recommended timeframes for your child’s homework and will provide supporting materials for you to read to help you decide what is best for your child, in your particular family settings.

At Fruition, we believe homework can be purposeful and beneficial for your child under certain conditions promoting independent and self-sufficient learners over time:

• Homework ‘should’ reinforce classroom concepts i.e., homework is most effective if it helps your child practice what was done at school today.

• Consolidating the work completed in class promotes long term memory retention and deeper understanding.

• Bringing the work home from the classroom helps show you what your child is learning at school.

• Knowing what your child is learning in class can assist you explore additional, meaningful activities and conversations at home to expand on the learning.

• Being involved with your child’s homework can build communication bridges between home and school and this helps the discussion at parent/teacher interviews.

• Watching your child complete homework tasks gives you valuable feedback as to whether the child is coping, struggling, getting frustrated, progressing or is finding the work way too easy and unchallenging.

• Homework for early childhood learners provides a wonderful bonding time for parents and children to read together at home and can foster a love of stories and language and can stimulate creative conversations all while improving the child’s recognition of words and sounds.

• As the child develops and gets older they are expected to become increasingly more independent with their learning and thus homework helps them become responsible for their own learning, following instructions, learning to think for themselves by solving problems and learning how to research to find information, for example.

• “Homework teaches children that learning occurs in places other than classrooms and at school; it fosters life-long learning skills.” Wendy Ashley-Cooper, Head of School – The Glennie Anglican Girls’ School, Toowoomba.

• Homework for older children begins to foster an independence so that they can learn effectively without immediate teacher or adult direction.

• Homework promotes time management, research skills and study skills that equip primary school children for high school and beyond.

• Forming good homework and study habits early in life definitely benefits learners in the senior years where they otherwise would not cope with the demands of homework and assignments and exam study.

• Stephanie Munday-Lake, Deputy Principal of Hillbrook Co-educational Anglican College, Enogerra, says “that homework can help a student achieve their individual learning goals …” view video

• Homework can help teach children that they need to take responsibility for their own learning.

• Harvard Family Involvement Research teams have found that there is a direct correlation between positive parental involvement in children’s learning and increased learning outcomes and success for the child from the cradle to the career. www.hfrp.org/family-involvement andFINE newsletters

April FINE Newsletter: Family Engagement Across the Developmental Continuum

Fruition suggests that you can use homework as a means to become involved with your child’s learning from the cradle to the career.

Listen to the pod casts, watch the videos, read the emails and search the links to read more about how homework can positively benefit your child and their learning success. Parents, be encouraged to be decisive about how you choose to engage with their child in learning and by setting clear goals and expectations about homework for your child.

Homework can be detrimental and irrelevant for your child and has some disadvantages too:

• If homework has no connection with the classroom work the child (and the parents) may not be able to complete the task having no ‘background’ demonstration or understanding

• If homework is not set regularly then the child may not learn the skills associated with consistent routine

• If the homework is not corrected with meaningful feedback, to explain why the answer was incorrect or how to do an unanswered question, then the child may learn that there is no need to take homework seriously

• If the child takes a long time to complete homework they may well become burdened and stressed and may not have enough ‘free time’ to play outside, to chat and to relax

• Homework can be particularly difficult to manage for single parent families with one parent juggling the pressures of work/career and home duties (see this email from a 4bc listener)

PDF/Word doc an email from a grandparent who supports his grandchildren and her daughter who is a single mum who works fulltime à see attachment EMAIL for lead article on Homework for your child

• Homework time may stop children playing outside and keep them inside and non-active

• British children’s book author of the award winning Montmorency series, Eleanor Updale, says that “Homework is detrimental to family life”; “homework is polluting family life” and “homework is turning children into couch potatoes.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7692256/School-homework-is-polluting-family-life.html

• If homework is too complex, too easy, too ambiguous and/or too lengthy it can lead to anxiety, frustration, arguments and feelings of guilt/inadequacy

• If your family has two or more children, then it is likely that teachers will set different amounts of homework and one child may find they have many more demands and less time to play, so this could cause some tension

• Some educators don’t believe in setting homework feeling that it is better to manage learning in the classroom and thus taking pressure of families to complete school work at home

If homework is causing too much stress in your home for you and your child, then Fruition Tuition recommends that you make an appointment with the classroom teacher, year level coordinator or school administration to discuss what is needed and expected for your child’s needs and your particular circumstances.

Some recommended homework timeframes for your child:

NB it is important to realise that children learn and work at different speeds and that some subjects are more assignment and research oriented, and therefore the length of time it takes for your child to complete homework, will vary.

Fruition recommends that you talk with your child’s teacher, year level coordinator and/or school administration to discuss what is a ‘reasonable’ homework load for your child, in your family circumstances.

It is very important to separate a child’s worth from the pressures of performance and results.

Parents need to review and monitor their expectations and those of their children so that child and adolescent issues around anxiety, depression, eating disorders and youth suicide don’t manifest.

Fruition HomeworkTips can help make homework drama free:

As Bart Simpson famously says, “Homework happens!”

Whether you believe in homework or not, it is likely that your child will experience the need to manage homework tasks. We hope that these tips will help you keep your home a combat-free zone:

• Make homework a routine. Have a designated area (clutter and distraction free) and designated time for homework. This time does not have to be after school. If your child is a ‘morning person’, is there an opportunity to work on activities before school?

• Have a stash of stationery (lead and coloured pencils, pens, ruler, calculator, compass, protractor, glue, paper, cardboard) on hand to deal with the unexpected task or the ‘forgotten’ pencil case.

• Help your child develop effective work habits by identifying and discussing what skills need to be learned. Try to positively frame the way you talk about homework. Try not to see it at as a problem and a burden rather as an opportunity to learn something new.

• Discuss the homework that has been set and create a prioritised list (try and start with the easiest task to build confidence, success and completion moving on to the more difficult or longest task). Ask your child where they think they should begin their homework to foster good planning and independence. If your child cannot complete one question, move on to the next question and write a note/email to the classroom teacher to ask for assistance or clarification.

• Encourage the use of a student diary by referring to it when planning homework and the order in which it is completed. Is your child writing down all of the homework required? Check with your teacher if you sense that the homework tasks recorded are incomplete or not fully understood and noted by your child.

• Communicate with the teacher. If you are having difficulty interpreting a question, write a small note in the homework book or diary or send an email. This will make the teacher aware of any problems and avoid your child experiencing anxiety due to the incomplete task.

• Model effective work habits. When it comes time to pay the bills, do the shopping, plan a birthday outing or catch up on some work, ensure your child sees you following your own advice! If you complete these tasks on your lap in front of the TV, your child will want to do the same.

• Involve your child in your daily tasks. Ask questions like, “what do you think needs to be done first?” Make a list, order the list and follow the list demonstrating how to change the list and order if things change and we have to flexibly alter the plan. Young children love to contribute so involve them in your activities so that they learn to manage their own.

• Celebrate success. When an item can be ticked off the list, you can celebrate a small accomplishment has transpired. Most of us can relate to the positive feeling of accomplishing a larger task, one step at a time. Children learn to manage larger projects by breaking the task down into bite-size pieces that they can conquer one step at a time. This is a learning strategy for work and life.

Remember at Fruition we say that ‘parents are children’s heroes’ so you can expect a child who is struggling with homework or school work to be on the defensive when it comes to homework because they want to impress you and feel obligated to please you. Understand that your child can become upset and difficult because they don’t want you to see that they are not coping.

Chapter 2 of Fruition’s Action Book for Parents “You are not raising children, you are raising adults” deals with this issue and others in more depth.