King's Blog

My daughter has to present a speech at school today.  As I waved her off, with a few encouraging words, I took a little time to reflect on how happy and confident she appeared.  I too was happy and confident – happy she had worked hard on preparing her speech and confident she was going to do very well in her presentation.

When I was at Primary School, one of my favourite times of the week was ‘project time’.  It was when we were all given a chance to explore a topic of interest, in greater depth and to write and draw about it in our project book.  I loved the planning, the reading up on a topic, drawing or finding pictures and then laying it all out nicely with my best handwriting.  Sometimes we even took our project books home so that we could continue our work at home before bringing it back to present to the class.

Ever felt stressed out by your children’s homework assignments? Do you feel a responsibility for the work your child hands in?

Research from the UK suggests that parents who help their children with their homework may be having a negative effect on their children’s grades.

Last weekend I was assisting my son to do some research on his laptop. I would love to say he was cooperative, but that wasn’t quite how it played out.

I asked him to show me the topic he was researching, in this case a biography. I looked on Haiku for the scaffold for the task and the child simply had to simply look through what information was required for each paragraph and find the research. Simple enough I thought - however, occasionally it doesn’t seem so, and in my case, my son didn’t want to look beyond web page one, let alone actually read what was on the page.

“Have you done your homework?”  “I don’t have any!”

Does that sound familiar? Have you thought about changing the name from homework to something like study time? No homework from school? Excellent, how about you revise maths, English or spelling, or get ahead on that assignment? Still nothing?  Oh well, this is study time so some silent reading will be a good choice.