GRADE 4/5 WEEKLY HOMEWORK

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Home : 2003 : October : 10

GRADE 4/5 WEEKLY HOMEWORK
By HEIDI

I have two scenarios to present to you:
In my school, every teacher (EVEN KINDERGARTEN) sends home a homework sheet on Monday which is due on Friday. Parents love it because they can work a bit each night with their kids
and they always know what to expect. If a kid has sports or girl guides, they work around it because they have all week. The assignment for my grade 4/5 class includes a spelling list and supporting grammar activities on one side, and math problems on the other side. The math problems typically include 5 functions problems every week, then a variety of questions straight out of our

curriculum document (I even include the outcome number). If a parent says it's too difficult... I can say it's what the province tells us to teach! In addition to this, I send home a weekly writing assignment on Monday which is also due Friday. It is usually a paragraph of the week taken from http://www.teachersdesk.org/topics/par_week_program.html . Parents never complain, as I started the year with a homwork expectations memo that went home and had to be signed and returned. In fact, I find that by doing tougher curriculum questions as a "Problem of the day" in math where we work through it together and the kids copy it down, and sending home the simpler ones to reinforce concepts, parents are always in the loop as to what their child is working on. And I've informed parents that their child usually has somethng similar that can help copied in their math duotang from a problem of the day. The writing assignment is something I added this year and I have to admit I am loving the increased role parents are playing in proofreading and helping their children improve their writing style. Parents have to initial to show they have proofread the assignment with their child. Of course, I still teach things like IDEAS, PURPOSE, VOICE, and TRANSITIONS in class with classwork assignments. Overall, the kids are very proud of their creative writing pieces and we choose the best ones from the month to type up on computer and publish.

The second scenario that may help is this: at a high school I taught in, they coordinated workload on students by assigning first perios teachers MOnday, second perios teachers Tuesday, etc. SO the kids knew that on a MOnday, the only subject they could have a test in was the first peiod subject. Something similar might work for assigning homwork. Assign days of the week to match the periods.