Homework question

[elkiedee]

DS1 has just started year 1 and just told us about his homework for next Tuesday -which is good, we need to get into a routine of remembering to check what it is.

He has two small pieces of work.

One is a few words and it's clear what we need to do, though I wonder about "Use the word bank to label the settings" - is that clear for 5 year olds?

The other is maths - it says numbers to 20, place-value - there is nothing written down and DS1 had to explain to me twice what he has been asked to do. I showed it to dp for his opinion and he doesn't understand it.

What worries me is if DS1 ever doesn't understand what he has to do for homework and it comes home in this form, I don't have enough information to help him, nor does dp.

How do you discuss issues like this with your dcs' teachers/schools?

It should be clearer. Ask the teacher to explain.

Sounds like poor communication, my DD2 is in Yr5 and gets much clearer instructions than that for her work.

Place value in maths is about being able to understand that in the number 15, for example, the '1' actually denotes 10. It's about tens and units at this stage, later on there will be hundreds and thousands. The idea is to make children understand and work with numbers of all sizes.

Yes, I realised that. DS1 knows what he needs to do in this piece of work, but I'm not sure that he understands the place value concept or how that is being taught.

I think that most schools try to keep the language the same from an early age as to what they will be using further up the school.
I would imagine that the expressions 'word bank', 'place-value' et al are used constantly and consistently throughout the lesson.
I remember when DS2 was in Y2 and had to do some maths homework. He had forgotten what to do, I read it, as did my DH - both good at maths - and hadn't got a clue and would only have been able to make an educated guess as to what she wanted him to do.
I went in and asked, and remember thinking that it was so easy - but I just hadn't understood her terminology. Everything seems to have been given a different name than we used in the good old days (not quite slates and chalk, but not far off )