Homework for 5-6 yr olds

[TinyGang]

My dd is in year 1 at school and has homework each week (about 5 spelings to learn) and reading to practise.

She seems to manage this quite well but obviously this requires quite a bit of help and encouragement from us which we willingly do. Part of me can see why they do this and I don't mind, but I suppose I am a bit surprised that she is getting formal homework at this age.

When the Christmas holidays started, she came home with some more, but something different this time to the spellings. She had to find out all about dinosaurs, write about them, pictures etc. Again, I was rather surprised at this, as I guess I thought they wouldn't be expected to be doing homework with all the Christmas things that were going on, especially at this age.

It was requested that this was handed in on January 4 (first day back). We duly found the time to help her with all this and she did quite a good piece, I thought. I am quite annoyed that she has not had any feedback about this piece of work as yet from school (apparantly they even mislaid it at one point), although I guess that may follow this week.

I just wondered whether homework at this age was something you all expect yr1's to get? I don't even remember being expected to do any even in Junior School, but maybe I just had it easy!

It worries me in that speaking to Mums with older children at the adjoining Junior School, the homework situation seems to take off in a somewhat worringly big way. This is apparantly rather unpopular as they do start to get quite a lot by all accounts. I suppose I feel they are a bit young for all this and too much will turn them off the whole idea of wanting to learn.

We are on the whole very pleased with dd's school, it has very good results and she is very happy there. I'm not complaining, and will happily support both her and the school - just concerned. What experiences do other Mums (or teachers too!) have of this?

[hatstand]

Interesting point Caligula. I don't know enough about it to know, in practice, which way it works. I probably shouldn't even be on the thread as my dd is only in reception. She brings a new book home on Mondays and Thursdays and has an exercise book where we are meant to write the name of the book, to confirm it's been read at home. She also brings home a sounds book, with letters and easy words to practice. I have to confess that dh and I are very bad at making sure she does what she is meant to, but I am reasonably confident that we make up for it in other ways: Lost count of the number of trips to Natural History museum and science museum; she loves doing maths (which they don't seem to do at school) and can do quite complicated multiplication, just because she enjoys it and asks. There's an article somewhere mentioned in the mn newsletter thingy arguing that - at least at nursery age - there is too much focus on reading and that children miss out on simply exploring the world.