On most days of the school year I hear the following comments; often within the same five minutes…”yeah, we have no homework!””man, there is so much homework” “I have too much homework” “we hardly have any homework” “I am never going to get all my homework done”” I wish we had more homework” “my mom says I have too much homework”…you get the picture?

Here is a snapshot of homework in 5KP…

Students may or may not have homework for P.E., Music, Art and Chinese: that is out of my control.

I expect that each child should be reading for around 30 minutes every night. This of course depends on the rest of their schedule for that evening and as many of the students love to read, this is often not a problem. It would be ideal if on a couple of nights a week they are able to read aloud to another person in the house, preferably a parent and that the parent then asks them some questions such as what do you think will happen next? Why did that happen? What does this mean? When parents engage like this with their child it helps the child on many levels, I think the most important one is that the child knows their parent is taking the time to show some interest in their son/daughters reading development but it also reinforces some of the skills they need for school, especially for tests such as the D.R.A. that they recently completed and that they will take again in 6 months time.

During most math units there will be a study link 4 nights a week. There should always be math revision over the lesson and some students have work from class to finish off at home. Many students were disappointed with their unit two math test result, however the class average was the same as unit 1, 83%: half the class improved on their score, three students earned the same score and more students scored over 90% than last time. I hope they spent some time going over their test with you last night as we spent a full period going over their responses yesterday.

Every week the students have two spelling units to complete between Monday and Friday. This levels out to one page of spelling/grammar/word study per night and as I showed the students in class yesterday, there are some great sites to enhance the spelling program such as spellingcity.com which is included in my blogroll. The emphasis in our spelling program is not on weekly drills and spelling tests but rather on fostering an interest in language and its origins and trying to add to our own vocabulary through discovering new words and learning to understand their meaning.

For language arts class your child may be writing or reviewing the unit we are doing in class. Often they will have drafting work to complete. I encourage the students to try and focus on a couple of ways to improve each time they draft, for example one night could be spent working on sentence fluency and word choice and another night might be about adding better verbs to their writing.

In Social Studies and Science there will be times during the quarter where there is little or no homework and at other times the students will be working on a project that will take over your spare time as well as your living room! The trick at these times is to work on balance and time management and of course not leave things to the last minute.

Technology homework is always an option. There are nights when I will set writing or researching tasks for the students to complete on their blog. I am well aware that access to a computer and a working network are not always possible and I ask that the students complete their work on paper if this is the case. I don’t want to set too much homework in tech for this reason however when a child comes home and says that have no homework, this is the first place I would send them. There is always something new being posted on my blog, the 5^th grade teachers’ and students’ blogs or out there on the world wide web. They can spend that time, reading, writing or commenting on blogs.

I want the students to have time to play, to rest and to spend time with their family as well as developing a solid work ethic when it comes to school work. It would be great if at this young age they were able to find the happy balance that I am still looking for in my own life!