The Case Against Homework?

booksThere is a growing number of parents and organizations that are seeking to ban homework. Have you heard about this?

Individuals who are anti-homework explain their stance, pinpointing the following 3 reasons:

1. Homework doesn’t allow kids to be kids after school. After a long day at school, kids come home and must continue their day by completing assigned homework. This cuts down on their play time, when kids can run around and exercise. It also cuts down on the time kids can spend fostering their creativity, pursuing activities that are of more interest to them.

2. It takes away from the time they should be spending with their family. Rather than enjoying the rest of the day together, kids have to go to their room and study. Furthermore, even if their parents help, the experience isn’t a positive one as it can be frustrating if there’s a difficult task to complete – which brings us to our next point.

3. Parents aren’t teachers (well, at least many of them). Teachers are educated and trained to teach, but most parents have no qualifications. How can they help their child when they don’t know how to teach, or may not even know what their child is studying?

We hear many complaints and arguments from children who have to do their homework, including a recent news report about an 11 year old boy in California who went missing for 7 hours, just because he was afraid he’d get into trouble for not completing his homework (there was no indication of abuse at his home). Do you think it’s time we started listening to our kids? Maybe their complaints are actually valid, and we should eliminate or at least reduce the amount of homework our schools give out.

Homework Tips

homework

As a parent, helping your child with their homework is a necessary part of parenthood. But it can be difficult to help with homework when you’re not a natural teacher. Here are some tips that can help you create a conducive environment for homework:

1. Set up a routine: Kids thrive on routines, and it’s one of the easiest ways to make completing their homework a regular part of their schedule.

2. Prepare an environment that fosters learning: Turn off the television, radio, video games and anything else that may be a distraction. Your kids need to focus on the task at hand, and there should be nothing that distracts them from doing so (the same goes for you, the parent, as well!).

3. Introduce your child to bountiful resources available at the library: One of the most important abilities a child in school should have is to be resourceful. They need to learn how to find the information they require to complete their homework, so introduce them to the library and reliable sites online.

4. Know what’s going on at school and what homework needs to be completed: Parents should be kept up to date with what assignments have been given to students and what activities are going on. This way, you’ll always know what needs to be done, and your children won’t be able to lie.

5. Complement your child’s natural learning process: Not every kid learns in the same way, just like adults. Some kids may learn from doing or reading, while others may learn from listening. Figure out how your child learns naturally first. Then, you’ll be able to help with their homework more effectively.

6. Encourage your children: No matter how old your kids are, encouragement is always appreciated. Encourage your children by complimenting them on tasks completed and gently correcting mistakes. This creates a great environment for learning!

7.  Be a Role Model: A lot of what kids do is learned behaviour, and parents tend to be their first resource for this. If you want your kids to be dutiful in completing their homework, you should also complete tasks that need doing rather than procrastinating or ignoring them.