Flexible Homework!

The awesome first grade team at my school is mixing things up with HOMEWORK for the first time!  I am excited to be a part of this journey!  I did not create any of these materials.  They were made by my team and/or found from online resources.  In addition to my flexible seating options in my classroom, students also have a FLEXIBLE HOMEWORK board to complete each month.  There is a monthly calendar full of fun and creative things to do at home.  Some are service oriented while others have you create, build, and explore, and some have you go on a scavenger hunt in your home.  Students can choose to complete as few or as many of these choice board activities a month that they like.  The feedback from parents has been wonderful!  They keep sending me photos of their kids making fun things, giving service, bonding with a parent and/or siblings, and more.  This has strengthened the connection between home and family.

In addition to the monthly choice board, they have a weekly "packet" that goes home.  They have high frequency words we have learned in class to practice reading for 60 seconds a night.  Read independently or someone read to them for 15-20 minutes a night.  Then, there are suggested activities to practice their basic math skills (right now- practice counting to 120), spelling words for the week, and an occasional math worksheet that may go home (right now I'm just sending home the math review sheet completed in class for extra practice before math test days).

After being a stay-at-home mom for 7 years, my views of parent communication and homework changed drastically!  It was a constant fight to complete 1-2 hours of homework a night that the kids could rarely do independently (I'm taking crazy long packets of 1st grade homework!).  My kids both excel in school and are well behaved.  Homework became the only negative thing about school, and it made evenings very stressful.  They had already been sitting in a chair learning for 6.5 hours that day, then they were expected to come home and sit for another hour or two to do homework (which a LOT of parent help).  My kids would look at me and say they just want to go outside and play or go upstairs and build with their Legos or play Barbies.  As a teacher and dutiful mom, I made them get their homework done first.  It was torture!!!  Add on soccer practice a few nights a week, a soccer game every Saturday for 4 months, church activities once a week, and you are lucky to have any down time.  My kids also have an early bedtime of 6:00pm, so it made things even more difficult.  Now that they are in 2nd and 4th grade, I have moved bedtime back to 7:00pm in hopes of having more interaction and play time after I get off work with my kiddos.

I do not want my students to go through the same problems and stress when they go home.  My goal is for them to spend no more than 30-40min. a night on homework (including 15-20 min. of daily reading).  I have moved my children's daily reading to part of their morning routine, so now homework after school is more manageable, and since they are older, they can do most of it independently.  Their current teachers are also backing off of sending home "packets" of worksheets for homework.  The focus is on reading their AR book daily, writing a brief summary, and other random projects that come home.

My coworker started the new homework this year after years of her own personal research about the benefits of homework.  She found that there was no real correlation between homework and success or improved scores in school.  Why stress out students, parents, and teachers (hours of grading and recording homework packets each week) when there is no real benefit?  Instead, I encourage kids to go home, eat a healthy snack, unplug technology, and go outside and play!!!  Or they can explore all of the toys in their rooms, use their imaginations, and create something new and wonderful!  My son's favorite time in his room is taking apart his fancy Lego ships and buildings something entirely new from his imagination.  He took apart the Millennium Falcon and rebuild his own "Millennium Pidgeon."  Sometimes kids need the opportunity to be bored and have nothing structured to do.  It is during those times that my kids are most creative and imaginative.