can't be 'polite' and good any longer....

[swallowedAfly]

ds goes to a village primary with all the subsequent over-reliance on parents wealth, education, time, etc. re: assuming sahms are the norm, money is plentiful for fanciful trips and activities, we all know how to sew up costumes at the drop of a hat etc.

that's fine. i chose to live here. however....

homework is way over the top in terms of quantity and right from day one of school. one part of homework (there is loads) is the 'learning log' which is pretended to be something children could do indepndently and consolidates learning. except in reality it is not, by a long shot.

i've put up with it and put up with and felt enslaven to doing it until today when i've had enough. this week for ds (6yo and one of the most able in his year) it says, "show me what you've learned about number bonds up to 20 and what patterns you can see". then there's a blank page.

i don't know why (because this is far from the worst that's come home) but today i've had enough and found myself writing on the page that i have no idea what the learning objective is, what outcomes they're hoping for or how the hell they see this as differentiated. i've also asked how they think a parent with numeracy or literacy problems would tackle this task and whether they would actually set this as a task in class to 6yos and expect a meaningful outcome.

there is no context, no structure, no literacy support, no prompts nothing. same as ever. sometimes the tasks don't even relate to anything they've been learning.

am i totally unreasonable or would you after a year or so be fed up too? i am (if it's not obvious) an ex teacher and i know what education is supposed to be about and this is not it. homework should be meaningful. how could a 6yo read that question and face a blank page and do something a teacher could look at and assess to see what they've learnt? they couldn't.

on top of this learning log (given on a friday and expected in by tuesday) daily reading and signing of reading book is expected plus other bits and bobs. he's 6! he's been getting this since 5 at a point where some kids couldn't even write let alone face a blank page and an open ended task and produce something yet they'd get in trouble if they didn't. this is just a test of parents surely? and an unfair one given it assumes knowledge and literacy that some parents won't have?

sorry for long random rant but help! i'm not playing this game anymore and i'm ready to speak up. it's a joke.

Sounds like a load of educational bollocks to me. You could quite realistically not do any of this at all with this age of child, and it would have no consequence on their education at all in the long run.

And yes, that's my professional opinion.

tis indeed a load of bollocks.

trouble is the pressure on them - i could say, nah we're not doing that but ds is the one who has to go in there and be the one child not conforming to the bollocks.

It says "show me what patterns you can see" not "describe in words the patterns you can see" So no writing is required. ( Although yes, he would have written an explanation, but you probably wouldn't understand a word as he has dyspraxia too!)

and how is it fair to say hey, able child here's 20 spellings and a page of writing sentences for you to do when less able child only has to learn 5 spellings. a) talk about punishing ability and b) your concentration span and ability to sit still and do a test is limited at 6. no matter how good your spelling you're still not meant to be sitting still doing a test and writing for that long at a time.

daftness.

it's a blank page inviting pen and says 'show me' - how many 6yos would interpret that to mean oh i could do an interprative dance piece or draw a picture of number bonds - how the feck does one draw those anyway?

i'm pretty clever but i wouldn't want to be 'drawing' my answers on here so i'm reliant on having developed literacy skills that have a vague chance of reflecting what i'm thinking/abstract ideas/yada yada. at six - not so much.

Actually nothing would really happen if you never did it, you know.

the child shits themselves if they haven't done the homework because they get in trouble for it

I do think this is all kinds of wrong. At this age, homework ought to be reasonably fun. Reading and being able to write are the absolute basics because you can't access the rest of the curriculum without them. Anything over and above that ought to be completely optional and hopefully a task that children will go home and ask to do.

Last year, DD and the rest of KS1 had an extra optional piece of homework once per half term as they will this year (the others were just the reading and spelling I've mentioned earlier). They were great fun and she loved loved loved doing them. They were things like 'build a house for a mouse', 'make a timeline of your life', 'find out three facts about any country in the world and present them creatively' etc. She had a ball doing each and every one of them and was so proud to take her work in and show it to her teacher. Plus they were all completely open-ended and it was very much a case of people doing what engaged them about each task - and a child who wasn't interested didn't have to do them anyway, though there was pretty much 100% participation in a very socially mixed school. Each child approached it very differently. But they were fun things to do at home, not more formal learning. I really don't like the worksheet model of homework at all. Plus, presenting homework as a fun thing sets up good associations for the future rather than making it an awful task that you get told off for not completing. I'd be horrified to have to make my daughter do 'real' homework at this age.

If I were you, I wouldn't do it. I'd let your son do as much as he's capable of in ten or twenty minutes and hand that in. It doesn't really matter that much. Tell your son that nobody should make him feel bad about it and that it doesn't matter if he does it or not. Because at this age, it really doesn't!

Boffin, tbh I agree with you - I'm not a fan of homework (except for daily reading, and being read to if the parent is capable of it) at primary age BUT this one is no worse, and in many respects rather better, than normal 'fiull in a sheet' type homework.

I can understand, however, that the context is critical - if the teacher accepts as interesting anything that the child produces, and clearly values children's own work over much more beautiful stuff created by parents, then that is fine, whereas if there is a hiuge focus on spelling, handwriting, presentation, 'correctness' then there is huge pressure on parents to 'help'.

FWIW, I have never helped my children with their homework. I used to read them the task (if that was needed) and provided equipment - still have the leftovers of the biggest roll of plain wallpaper B&Q sold - space and a listening ear. Once the time was up, I'd send in whatever they had done.

Our school gives out these open ended tasks, only they are called challenges, and it is up to the child if they go and get one and take it home and there is no consequence if it is not done. If it is done they get a sticker from a teacher they have to go and find in playtime, who has a quick look at it. Funnily enough, given the paper comments up thread, you choose your answer paper too, plain, squared, graph, half lines with half blank or fully lined I have seen DS bring home. I don't help, my helping makes DS cross and I think the teacher should see the end result as a 6 yo would approach it.

FWIW a food diary and that number bond question would be typical. My ds would make a decent job of both with no support, but it would look messy.

My dd is not as good at reading as ds and she would need me to read the task to her. If I wasn't there to do that she would remember best she could from when the teacher read it out and go from there, which I think is fine.

No I get you Swallowed, I really do. I haven't had the frustration yet because DD1 in the nicest possible sense is a bit of an automaton when it comes to learning so it works for her but DD2 is quite different so I'm sure it's coming.

You'd have to be a child with an exceptionally flexible understanding of what "number bonds" and "patterns" mean to extend your work into subtraction, surely??? I thought number bonds were supposed to be simple addition facts that primary school children are expected to be able to memorise???? Is a 6-year old really going to launch into a discussion of negative numbers and the relationship between addition and subtraction (eg if 2+18=20, then 20-2=18) when asked, "show me what you've learned about number bonds up to 20 and what patterns you can see"????? And if they do this in their homework, what is the teacher supposed to do with it? Ask Mum and Dad if they spent hours doing it with him, or is he a child genius with a huge passion for homework?

Drawing number bonds is easy - and the less able (and without parental input) would probably do it anyway as it might well be the way they work out such things. Draw 20 dots - a group of 1 and a group of 19. Then underneath it draw 20 more dots - a group of 2 and a group of 18. Great way of showing the patterns.

Ach I agree with so much of this. However I have been singing that sodding number bonds song all the way through the thread and no doubt will be singing it for the rest of the evening

wallpaper sounds great imagine they'd look horrified if he came in with it though.

it's an a4 landscape book that they keep all year and a new sticker with the task gets stuck in each week. the whole thing is kept and out at parents evening, kept as evidence etc which makes it... dunno.

this has been since 5.

happily read with ds, happily explore topics, look things up, have discussions, go to museums, etc. force him to sit down and try and write above his ability, motor skills and attention span for his age is not good for us. i want him to like learning - not see it as a tick box exercise to get in trouble for.

we didn't do it one week and he was kept in at breaktime. things do happen - not to me obviously but to him/ it's a punitive exercise.

Rabbitstew, it depends on the child (DS, as I say, is wired sideways) and on the maths scheme used. One I have used teaches 'families' of facts - you know that 1+ 3 = 4 so you also know that 1+3=4 and 4-1=3 and 4-3=1 - as soon as it teaches any form of number bond, so the reversibility of the two operations are known by the child from the start.

DS's teacher would be well aware - as I am aware of the children in my class who would go off on extended mathematical 'riffs' of this type - that it would just be DS being DS....

Situated cognition is what kids should be doing at home at this age - helping with practical family based activities that hopefully overlap with school learning, for example working out how many sausages to buy for tea, how to draft some sort of legible letter to Santa, that kind of thing.

Children this age learn about "number families" so if 1+19=20 then 19+1=20 and 20-1=19 and 20-19=1.

I wasn't saying that ALL children would do this but, as teacherwith2kids said, this is where the differentiation and extension comes through. Some children definitely would, we have a child just gone into year 2 who is working out his multiplication and division number families to 12 x 12. Number bonds to 20 would be a doddle for him!

totally agree boffin and that's what we do. would rather be doing that than wasting time forcing writing onto paper for fear of being 'punished' if you don't.

if 2+18=20, then 20-2=18

I think this is what teaching maths is trying to aim at for all children, actually. Because this is showing a real understanding of what numbers mean. Memorising the facts isn't actually that useful. If you haven't understood them, you are really quite likely to forget them. There won't be that many children of six who will get this to the extent of being capable of showing their understanding of subtraction as a different way of adding up, but hopefully that's what the school is working towards because otherwise that's a dreadful school. I know that DD's school is quite explicit about the flip side of number bonds and making sure that children know that 10-3=7 is just another way of looking at 7+3=10.

Hear hear, boffin. Much more useful and more actual learning involved.

Swallowed, can you mention to the teacher homework nazi that actually you won't be doing this as you've got other educational things planned?

(It's not really aimed at your kids anyway, I bet).

The educational research is on the side of practising applied knowledge, not abstract calculations and lots of homework.

exactly it's aimed at parents who allegedly wouldn't do anything with their kids unless 'made to'. trouble is ds gets punished if we don't and there is a big deal of a tuesday morning about whether kids have their homework or not.

not just one teacher btw - whole school policy.

How much do you want to fight this battle?