How to assign Homework

 Homework is an important part of learning, but sometimes parents find it hard to keep up with what needs to be done and it has become daily a struggle.
Homework, or a homework assignment, is a set of tasks assigned to students by their teachers to be completed outside the class. Common homework assignments may include a quantity or period of reading to be performed, writing to be completed, math problems to be solved, material to be reviewed before a test, or other skills to be practiced.

Generally speaking, homework should not aim to  improve academic performance among children but to improve academic skills among students. Most of the time it  also creates stress for students and their parents and reduces the amount of time that students could spend outdoors, exercising, playing sports, working, sleeping or in other activities.

I have a few important revelations about homework that may be useful. Especially, we teachers should always have the following ideas in mind before assigning homework to kids.

1. Homework should be clearly defined.

2. Homework is not unfinished class work that the student is required to take home and complete.

•        It is the “extra practice” that is given to take home to reinforce concepts that they have been learning in class.
•       It is important to note that teachers should always give students time in class under their supervision to complete class work.
•     Failing to give them an appropriate amount of class time increases their workload at home. 
•   More importantly, it does not allow the teacher to give immediate feedback to the student as to whether or not they are doing the assignment correctly.
•      Teachers must find a way to let parents know what assignments is homework and which ones is class work that they did not complete.

3.  The amount of time required to complete the same homework assignment varies significantly from student to student. This speaks to personalization. Differentiating homework will take some additional time for teachers in regards to preparation, but it will ultimately be more beneficial for students.

4. There are a few critical academic skill builders like reading practices and learning spelling for languages and memorizing times table that students should be expected to do every night or as needed. Teachers should also consider these things.

Therefore homework should be  basically a revision of the concepts that  have already been taught at school. So the majority of the time the students should be comfortable with the work that they're given.I think the first thing with students with homework, especially at an early age, is start to set them up into a structure of when to do their homework and how best to do it.

And, ideally, they should do a little every night, but kids have huge after-school things now every night, they have sports  and music lessons etc, so they need to work around it. And that's also a part of a life skill too.

 I usually suggest to the parents of my students, that at an early age they find a time that suits the children. So they come home and they've had a bit of time out, a bit of evening tea and then straight into their homework. If they have the same time every evening then they're aware of what's going to happen.

It's a good idea also to set a timer because they know that after 2 or 3 hours, depending on the age of the child, t if they've worked hard through that period, they can go. Have a clear, defined space so the kids know that it's homework time and it's time to concentrate.

Everyone's busy, so minimise the hours of each evening to sit down to see what's going on in our child's learning. As a teacher don't expect the parents to be an all around subject expert to help their child. When we set projects we really want to see what the students are able to do. There's no point for us receiving any work that has been done by anyone other than the student. It should consolidate the learning that they're doing in class.

 We really want kids to want to do homework, to want to read every night, to complete the tasks by themselves rather than punishing them for not doing homework.

 I always tell parents homework is about developing independence. If you're going to be sitting there beside them every night in Kindergarten and tell them exactly what to do and how to do it, you're still going to be doing that till class 12.