A Cure for the Frustrations of Homework
Advantages of Home Learning for Teachers and Students
A cure for the frustraion of homework assignments is home learning activities. This home learning should not be confused with home schooling; rather, it is just a nightly follow-up of the activities that occurred, at school, during the day.
Homework Frustration
How often do young students sit at the table crying because they don’t know how to do their homework? How often do parents call other parents, trying to understand why they can’t assist their child with division using the format they were taught? Come on, 777 divided by 11 is 77 no matter how the cookie crumbles.
How often do middle school students sit on their beds, frustrated by the fact that they are spending countless hours practicing skills that they have already mastered?
What is Home Learning?
Like homework, home learning is what it says it is. Home learning is learning at home. It incorporates activities/assignments that are engaging and challenging. Home learning is an invaluable educational concept; it’s an innovative tool that promotes learning and family involvement.
The Dreaded Homework Time Factor
Home learning should take no longer than ten minutes per grade level each evening. When focused, a first grader should be able to complete home learning in ten minutes, while a focused twelfth grader should be able to finish in 120 minutes.
Characteristics of a Home Learning Activity
- It must be engaging.
- It must be challenging, not just practice of a skill for which a student has already demonstrated long term mastery.
- It must be more than fun; it must invoke learning.
- Practice makes perfect, as long as it fits within the following parameters: It must be a skill that is important, and, on which, the student has not already demonstrated mastery over time.
- Even short home assessments are fine, as long as they are focused and infrequent.
- The assignment may need to be individualized.
- It must not be an assignment that the student does not understand prior to leaving school.
- It must take no longer than is developmentally appropriate for students of a given age.
Non-examples of Home Learning Activities
The assignment is to copy each word, from unit 3 in the spelling book, ten times. Many of the students could already spell all or most of the words correctly on the class pretest earlier in the week.
Since students ran out of time during class, the assignment is to read about how to do long division and to complete page 85 and 86 in their math books.
Examples of Home Learning Activities
A first grader, still developing large motor skills and learning to count, is assigned to jump a rope as many times as possible, count each jump, and record the results three times. Another student in the classroom, who is working on counting by fives, is assigned to count each jump as five and record the results.
Third graders, who are practicing addition and subtraction, are assigned to check out dice from the classroom stock and play Yahtzee with a partner at home. The student is to keep track of the scores and to determine the difference in the two scores.
After a unit on famous painters, fifth grade students are assigned to select their own favorite painter and to create a work of art in that artist’s style. Furthermore, they need to explain 3 ways that their work reflects the artist’s style.
Seventh graders, who are learning about economics, are assigned to select two stocks, track their gains and losses, over a two week period, and create a line graph of the results. Also, they need to decide which stock is the best investment and tell why.
The Cure for Homework Frustration
Rather than holding students accoutable for homework, teachers can challenge them with engaging, age appropriate home learning activities. These activities should be purposeful, stimulating, and appropriate for individual levels of skill and ability.
Home Learning
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Education & Career
Latest Articles