This Ain't Your Momma's Homework

I had a parent ask about homework this week. They asked what is the purpose and then told me horror stories of when they were a child. I understand and even lived through a few of those homework horror years. When I started teaching I vowed I would not give homework unless I had to. I hated homework when I was a child. Do all the odd problems 1-75. It was terrible. Busy work. Tradition? Everyone was doing it? I am not sure the reason.

My team has put together a homework plan for the students to follow each night. We have decided that it should not be frivolous or busy work. After reading "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, we decided to add a little practice each night to help students build their learning. the 10,000 hour rule Gladwell talks about in his book was very interesting. Read the book, get the information, understand our thinking.

So we ask that each student works on vocabulary words 10 minutes a night for two nights, spelling word sorts for 10 minutes for three nights, math practice for 15 minutes for four, possibly five, nights, and reading to fill up the rest of the hour.

• Vocabulary includes looking up word meanings and writing an example of how to use the work in a sentence. It also includes answering a question the teacher gives the students. We review these words weekly for five weeks and on the sixth week we review all five sets of words to see what they remember about the words.

• Spelling has always intrigued me. Giving a set of words on Monday to memorize and spell on Friday only to spell them incorrectly when using one of the words in a story. Where is the learning in that? So we use Words Thier Way spelling to work on patterns in words. Building spelling patterns can help students recognize the patterns they hear to help them spell better. We have students do word sorts each night. They sort words into patterns and write them. This helps them recognize and find spelling patterns. There are different sorts we have students do for different learning. We have a test on Thursday to see how they are doing on their weekly words. Every six weeks we test the students to see if they learned their patterns and what new patterns they need help with.

• Math homework goes for fifteen minutes each night. Most nights we have students take 4-10 problems home to practice what we worked on that day. They are a review of the lesson and helps parents and teachers to know if the student is understanding the concept taught in class. We do not want parents teaching a concept at home. We ask for support from parents if the student needs it, but parents shouldn't have to teach the lessons. In the case of the student that does not understand something, instead of fighting and arguing with parents and causing grief at home we ask parents to sign the page and write that they tried. This keeps peace at home and let's us know the student needs a review of the information. There is no penalty for having a signature on the page. If a student does not complete homework assignment they will complete it at school. The ultimate goal of homework is to help us understand whether a students understands the concept they are taught. Having the student do a few problems themselves without a partner or teacher can give us that information.

• Reading for 25-30 minutes each night gives students information, helps comprehension, and speeds their reading fluency. Students can read anything they wish at home. We just want them to read. One thing we ask students to do is to read to someone each night for 5-10 minutes. Reading out loud helps with fluency. Fluency is speed, smooth, and expressive reading. Reading a pictures book to a sibling or a magazine or newspaper article to a parent helps give purpose to reading.

Homework should not be a time of arguing or fighting for parents or students. My team wants students to have a sense of motivation to want to do their homework. We want them to understand that a little extra work in fifth grade will go a long way to help them build their skills they learn to help them go far in their lives. Adults have homework each night. We just do not think of it as homework. We work on our homes and families. Bills and hobbies. Learning and understanding the world around us. We do not want students to think they are doing homework, we want them to think they are learning and helping themselves grow. This ain't the homework I remember. Thank goodness.

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The Trouble With Homework

No other word drives a parent more crazy than Math homework. They know it is needed, but it gives parents the opportunity to teach their children how much they hate math and how they cannot do it. I hope that with a better homework plan that will change. I don't think we will ever change parents attitude for doing math, but we will end the frustration of parent and child sitting trying to complete a math page that neither understands. There needs to be a purpose and a need for homework. If there is not, there needs to be no homework for that night. There also needs to be a way out, if needed.

I was a teacher that did not like to hand out homework. I wanted the students to a go home and read each night and spend time doing a child's work (play). I never really knew what homework oils do for the student because when I was a student I was given busy work each night. Fifty math problems a night, with the answers in the back of the book. I don't think I ever learned anything doing homework. It was just something I did before I went out to play. I have changed my thought process. Our team has come up with a plan to make it more purposeful and meaningful for the students and the parents.

So what is the purpose for homework? To review what has been learned. Students need to review what has been learned so they can cement it into their minds. The learning does not end with the lesson. There needs to be practice. The homework should be a short practice page of what was learned that day. Short.
Another purpose is for the students to show their parents what they learned. We tell them to go. Home and teach their parents what they learned and if they say they are not good at math, teach them to be good at math. Show them how to do the problems. The student becomes the teacher and learns more by teaching.
Students need a way out if they cannot do the work. There needs to be a "parent signature" clause for our homework. If the student does not understand the work and the parent does not understand how to help or what they are doing, the parent can sign the pare and write a little note saying "we tried". This will let us know the student did not understand the work and we'll go over the problems and algorithms again. It also prevents frustration for the parents and students at home. We do not want frustration with any homework. We want them to understand it and feel they can do the problems.
One last reason for homework is we want students to learn how to work. We want them to understand that they can work on something and give it their best work, even if they do not succeed at it. We want them to learn tolerance for work. They will have work that will take them time to complete and will be done in small pieces. This is important for students to learn as they grow.

The problem with homework is that when it is used as a tool to give students something to do after school or because the book said to, we teach students to hate homework. That just produces people that hate homework.

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Who Has Need of a New Program?

We have a new program for Language Arts. It is an all encompassing program with Spelling, Reading, Writing, Vocabulary, and Grammar. There is always much to learn with a new program. It seems as though we have had a new program each year since I have been teaching. There are a few things about this program that I am liking and that are closer to what I am personally looking for.

I like the fact that it is using the same basic principles and lessons we have used in the programs we have used over the past few years. We have found success with some of these programs and to see them in the McMillan-Hill Treasures Program we will be using will make it easier and more familiar to the teachers and students. We will be using the same spelling ideas and the same grammar ideas. We will be using the writing traits program that we have trained the students on. They will still hear the same vocabulary with the programs we are using as we have given them with the other programs. The biggest difference is that this is a program with more scope and sequence, more schedule, and more spiraling.

The technology part of it is the most exciting to me. It has some parts that are still developing, but the beginnings are exciting to me. There is an online student book for students to use, to mark, to make notes, to have read to them. They will learn to identify Main Ideas in a story and mark them, in the online book. They can access the book and information from home so they can reread the information and complete assignments at home. Assessments can be done online for easier assessing for the teacher. We use our Utips program for testing in Math and Science. We have practice tests for Language, Math, and Science. We take our end of year tests on the computer, so it is wonderful that we can take most of our tests online.

My team has been working on getting computers in the hands of our students for years. Our ideas were hard to grasp and harder to finance, but we worked and gathered ideas for what we are doing now. We still have many ideas we want to put into practice. We are getting there, one computer program at a time. This program helps us get another step closer to our goal.

Wiki-What-ia?

I have been reading a book by Clay Shirky called "Here comes Everybody". He talks about how Social Media have changed our lives and how it keeps on changing. He started telling about the beginning of Wikipedia and how it evolved from Nupedia.

As he was telling the story a thought came to me about school. We could make an encyclopedia on our wiki for the students to add information on. When students complete a report they can add the information to the wiki. When the next year's students start on their report, they can gather information from the school wiki and then add information the found that was not there. They will be required to come up with at least three sources for their report. One could be the wiki, but they would need to find other information to add to the wiki, or find information that will dispute what was already there.

This could be an ever changing and building source. We could use it for all reports we do. We would add more people each year and more information each year. we would have our very own elementary Online Encyclopedia.

Your Homework For Tonight Is...

I have always had mixed feeling about homework. I never liked it as a child because I felt it was always busy work and I wanted to play and do other things. I didn't do much homework when I was in high school because I was too busy. I had friends to be with, fun to have, and high school was a place I went everyday to be with friends. The education was more of a by product of my social life. As a teacher I can see the benefits of having homework but we need to rethink how it should be done and why we need it. If it is not needed then it should not be handed out just to have it done. Busy work was never something I wanted to do... Unless I had to get something done during class then I gave the students something to enjoy. Killing them with work just makes them hate to work.

When students get home from school they need to have time to do other things if they want. They need to spend time with their family and friends. They need to participate in extra-curricular activities if they so choose. They need to have time to relax and do kids work(play). They need to explore, run, build their interests, research, build their talents, or do what they need to do for their family.

Homework can take away from these activities and make it harder at home for the student and the parent. Then there is the issue of the parents not understanding what needs to be done. When the student does not know how to do the homework the parents might have the same problem. There needs to be a safety net for the parents to either be able to do the math we teaching or we need to make sure the child knows how to do it.

So what do we do? We need to do a few things.
- There has to be a reason for the homework. We can't just send home a page because it is the next one to do. If the child needs to practice then send home a couple practice problems. There is no need for a big page of drill and kill. A few problems will help the student and the parent know the work and the. Have time to do other things.
- The safety net for my team is the parent signature. If the student cannot do the work and they give it an honest try, they are supposed to ask a parent to help them. If the parent does not understand what is too be done they sign he homework and write a small note saying that they tried. The teachers will see that and know that they tried. Safety in not understanding and yet they tried to get it done he best that they could.
- Homework should not take very long to complete. There should not be a hundred problems to do each night. 6-10 problems a night for math, 30 minutes of reading is more than enough for each child. If there is language or writing. The problem and time limit should be the same. Writing for 30 minutes and no more than 6-10 problems.
- 5 minutes of work for each grade level. (2nd grade=10 minutes of homework) I have not considered reading homework. We should be reading everyday and so that does not count for me unless I have a specific book a student needs to read for a specific reason. Take home library books are homework. They are sent home for the student to read and the student has no say in which book they get. That is not fun, that is homework.

Homework should have a meaning and an understanding to the student that they need it to be successful. We all need to see a need to do something. They might never see the need but it should be explained to them and they should know that it is important even if they do not like it.

Homework is not a bad thing, it just needs to be managed wisely so we help students and parents learn what we want them to know and not learn to hate education.

Got a Utip I can use?

Our firendly neighborhood Utips representative trained us on some of the new features in Utips(Utah Test Item Pool). One feature we are happy to have is the media piece. This is one of the pieces that we have been missing. It provides a place for teachers to upload files (.pdf, .doc, .whatever) for students to download at home. We have set up some testing for math, language, and science for the students to practice, and now we can have them download their assignments. We have set up the math for each topic by including the student pages and the check-up, the vocabulary and cloze story for each set of words, and the spelling words will be put up as soon as we can. Utips also added an upload option for the students. We have set it up so the students can complete an activity on a Word Processor and then upload it for us to correct. Wow. We are trying to get all of these thing in play, but they will get used as we need them. It is nice having all these options, because there has to be options.

If you are absent...

During the summer we worked on the wiki by changing the pandemic stuff to "If you are Absent" information. We started wrting our lesson plans so students could get on the wiki and find their classwork adn homework if they were gone. This made it easy for studnets to keep up with the basic work we were doing. We started on basic subjects like spelling, vocabulary, and math. These subjects and pages the students could download nad complete. Then we worked on the reading and writing pages for students to know what we want them to do each night. The biggest task we took on in the 09-10 years was Social Studies and Science. We put together a page for each topic and included everything we would need to run the lesson as a teacher. We include the test questions, objectives, assignments, timeline, vocabulary, and materials (books we will use, pages to download, and websites to view and learn from). These pages are used to show what we will be doing and to complete discussion assignments on.

Pandewiki

At the end of the 08-09 school year the swine flu broke out and we were in pandemic mode at school. We had to take steps for the students so if they closed the school down for any period of time, we needed to have lesson plans ready for the students to complete at home. So we thought, and thought, and thought. What about putting it on the wiki for the sudents to access at home? So we starteddiscussing what we wanted the students to do if they could not be at school. We made pages for all the major subjects in school: Reading, Spelling, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies. Under each of the subjects, we put information that would help the stuents find what they needed to do and pages they could download for help and to turn in. It was very basic in the beginning, but we found it to work. We added a few weeks worth of spelling, vocabulary, math pages, and had a few reading and writing activities put on. The students could all access it from home if they had the internet. If they did not, we could get a copy of the pages and work run off and ready for them at the school. This way we only had about 1/4 of the students to run information off for. It made it so easy.