Helping with homework…?

Sunday 11 March 2018

You might have heard about this news story this: UK parents help less with homework.

Parents in the UK are much less likely to spend more than an hour per day helping with their children’s homework compared with parents in other countries, a survey suggests.

A survey of 27,830 parents in 29 countries found only 11% of UK parents spent an hour per day helping their children, far behind 62% in India.

In our school, our Homework Policy is designed to best meet the needs of our pupils and their parents / carers. To help, we refer to research on how effective homework is.

Our Talk Time homework is intended to promote good speaking and listening skills, and quite often to raise awareness of moral issues such as whether or not animals should be kept in captivity. To get the most from Talk Time homework, turn the telly off and have a conversation around the table whilst eating your evening meal – you don’t need to spend extra, separate time to support your child! Encourage your child to use ambitious words, useful phrases and full sentences. Some sentence structures that can work well are:

Creative homework is an opportunity for your child to choose whatever they want to demonstrate some learning. For example, I can show what I know about food chains. Your child could present all their learning in so many different ways, from a diagram with notes to a story or comic strip. Parents’ and carers’ role is to support, encourage, help… but never to take over and do the homework! So, there’s no need to sit down and do the homework with your child – you could be getting on with some other household task. The fact that your child and you and both actively doing something can be a really good way to promote positive attitudes.

The other type of homework is Practice makes perfect. The work should be fairly straightforward for the child as there should be no need for new learning, so just some encouragement from you is needed. However, it would be a great time to get your child to teach you – they should be able to explain the key points or processes! Also, you might want to check what your child has done – not a big job.

Don’t forget that the most important things you can do at home to support learning are to be positive and encourage your child, and to make sure they read regularly, practise their spellings and practise some simple Maths – counting, number bonds (to start with, two numbers that make 10, like 3+7) and their times tables.