giving home school books (text books etc...)

[rrbrigi]

Hi,
I would like to start a discussion to find out opinions for parents and teachers about giving home school books (I mean the books which the children work in each lesson).

As a parent I think it would help me a lot if I could see what my child learnt in the school each day. Specially from math, English and science.

My child is ready to learn with me at home around 60 mins a day. But the problem is I do not know what to practice.

I think it is useless to practice the fractions at home (because I think he needs practice on that bit) when they learn the long division in the classroom. I think if I could practice the same thing with him at home as he does in the school, it could help him to improve his math way better than just random practices every day. But just practicing something on mymaths won’t deepen his knowledge, in fact it could make him confused, because they did not learn that in the school yet, or the work is too easy or hard. They got homework once a week from math (1 A4 paper maximum), but it does not reflect the whole week maths lessons. We do random practices know, but I do not think it benefited him at all, just took the time from him to do something else.

It also would help me to see what he does in school for English. For example, if he needs to write a story at home seeing his English book I would know the quality of writing he would be capable of and I also would see his teacher comments, so I would know what should he include in his story. Or I could see which part of the grammar they are learning in the school, so we can practice that at home. I think there is no point of practicing the power verbs at home when they are learning about adverbs in the school.

From Science is the same. If I would know what they do each lesson, we could see videos from the same thing, or reading pages on the internet about the same thing, it would help him to catch his interest in Science and deepen his knowledge.

It would be better for the teachers as well, because I do not think I am the only one who would help her kids to learn. Parents could spend the daily learning time with their kids more effectively and as a result kids would have better understanding about the things they learn.

I just feel that without his school books I do not even get the possibility to support his learning on the way he deserves. If I could see what he learnt in the school each day I strongly think as the time goes I could even improve his GCSE mark as he would get without this support.

So my question is:
Teacher why do not give the school books home?
Parents what do you think, would you like to see your children school books every day to help them in their learning journey?

Thanks for reading it.

I'm in front of my class 8.45 -3.15. I supervise all morning and afternoon breaks except one (my PPA afternoon) and take intervention groups at lunch time and reading cafe after school. Books go home with me to be marked.

My class have a homework book which they take home at the end of the week and reinforces the work they have done in class that week. About half are returned each week and some have never been returned since they were handed out in September.

Well, talking about free stuff and cultural differences, how much more can it possibly cost the school to get jotters with grids for numbers (I don't even think there is a name for this kind of stuff... Instead of lines they have little squares about 0.5 cm wide) and ruled for writing?
Still, I cannot complain. In another school near me the jotters have no lines at all... just blank pages. I saw with my own eyes a note left by the teacher reminding the parents to draw the lines before the child does the homework...
Our jotters have half the pages ruled, the other half... blank (better than nothing, though :D )

No, it was both, cant. It was used at school along with other resources. We rarely had set 'literacy' homework in primary, but if we did, it was usually based on the 'text book'. Rather than every child having to buy a specific e.g. story book to work on at home.
And yet, the book often came home with me, and I'd show my mum what we had been studying at school that day (if it was something from the book). And if I had been writing something in my literacy workbook I'd bring that home too.
The maths book was full of practice problems. Sometimes we would be told in class to 'do page 24' (it involved copying the problems down into our work book, then working out the answer, again in the work book, not in the 'text book'). I was at a small school with mixed classes, so school years 1-3 (IIRC about 22 kids) were in the same classroom with one teacher. So this was the kind of thing our teacher gave us to do while she worked with another year group. Maths homework (if any) usually consisted of 'page x from the book' which provided an option for getting more practice than there was time for in class. Often there was no homework but we'd still take our maths work book home (the book that in England, the teacher takes home, to mark), so our parents could see right away if we had been getting something systematically wrong, or simply been making lots of mistakes; so they could do more practice with us if they felt we needed it, or explain something we had clearly not understood.
It frees up the teachers' time, which they may use to focus on those who do not get as much support at home. In theory.

One of the problems with our system is that whilst it scores great in e.g. PISA tests for academic achievements, it scores terribly in the same tests (e.g. PISA) for social inequality. Unsurprisingly, if schools do indeed work closely with parents (unlike our school in England, where this is IMO merely lip service), then those kids who have parents who engage and have time, will have even more of an advantage than if school assumes the parents can't be counted on, and hence doesn't factor them in. Add to that the late starting age (when the difference between privileged and disadvantaged kids is much larger than at a younger age) and the lack of standardised testing, but nevertheless a selective system, based in part on teacher recommendations which are (have been shown to be) extremely biased, then you can see how school serves its unspoken but real purpose of not only educating children, but also recreating social inequality (whilst giving that inequality a veneer of meritocracy).

In contrast, I suspect that in England the reproduction of social inequality that occurs through schools, happens mostly on the basis of WHICH schools you attend. In any single school, children from disadvantaged and privileged backgrounds have much more equal chances than they do in my home country, due to many factors that reduce the effect of background (in comparison). However, the very privileged will attend private schools, and many more privileged will have the means to attend one of the 'better' state schools, whereas the disadvantaged are over-represented in the 'bad' schools. And so the education system DOES serve also to recreate social inequality.

Whereas in my country, which school you go to is no question; you go to your nearest one, and it will be a good school; private schools will be no better. A school is never 'full' - if more children need spaces, then more teachers are employed, and classrooms are created. But the chances of positive educational outcomes within the schools are heavily weighted against those disadvantaged kids whose parents don't engage. Whereas individual schools in England are (comparatively) great levellers, and the chances of good outcomes are weighted against those kids who cannot 'pick' a great school (by paying the fees or jumping through the hoops or buying the right house).

So, living in England and having my children in the English school system, I'd love the school to engage with me more, I struggle to see how it would hurt anyone if I was enabled to support my child more, by getting the workbooks home every day and effectively doing some of the marking/teaching work in place of the teacher. But I have grown to understand that I have to accept the system and work within it. And there are certainly advantages either way. I realise, theoretically, that it is great that all children within the school have 'equal-ish' chances, chances that don't rely on their parents supporting them. Not being able to efficiently and effectively support my own child in the way I know from home/my own childhood, which I'd love to do; has caused me to reflect and question my priorities, and what I wish for for my children. How important is it for them to achieve the maximum they can, 'their full potential', to be at the top of their class? Of course they could achieve more if I could support them more. They could race ahead. Accepting the difficulty of this has made me search out other things we can do, things that might be caught under the phrase 'sideways extension' if you like; exploring and expanding all sorts of interests. Whilst accepting that how well they do at school is a lot more independent of how much I'd be able and willing to support them than it would be back 'home'.

"Whereas in my country, which school you go to is no question; you go to your nearest one, " this was very much the norm here too until very recently when some bright person in the government decided it would be popular with parent voters to let parents think they had a choice of schools (parental preference) which in fact only served to create social inequalities (but it remains popular with those who can afford the game).
In many areas outside big cities it remains the norm that children attend their local school.

It's extraordinary isn't it, that pupils go to and from school with nothing in the uk. Every other country expects dc to use appropriate equipment
Still a slight improvement to my schooling in the 70s where we didn't have exercise books- parent teachers stapled together sugar paper and covered them with wallpaper samples. No lines, let alone grids.

"Every other country expects dc to use appropriate equipment ". Not sure how you equate leaving books in school with not using appropriate equipment

mrz I think most other countries do consider text books proper equipment along with pens and exercise books. That's my point.

The point is teachers use a variety of "text books" to plan for children's learning in school. The proper equipment is there.

But other countries do it differently. And have better results along with a later age of starting and no uniform.
Why are we so resistant to adopting other countries' practices?

When you say 'Better results', do you mean in Pisa? There are well-known problems with the Pisa measurement - some 'well performing' countries exclude the lowest 10% of pupils on the basis of 'Special Educational Needs'; some only include cities where schools select on social class and income grounds; some have extremely homogeneous populations.

I am not saying that the English school system is perfect: it isn't. Many of its problems are created by politicians, not educationalists - if we take the 'textbooks' argument, two contributing factors to this are a) money (schools are poorly funded and becoming more so - should a school sack teachers to buy textbooks?) and b) regular changes to the curriculum and testing (the new NC was produced with very little detail, and followed a whole new curriculum, which had had funding for new materials and training, that was scrapped before being implemented; SATs, GCSEs, AS levels and A-levels have all had multiple changes, some huge, over the last 5 years, and even between the major changes there is a lot of tinkering with the specs).

Those, along with the politcal change to school admissions, complicated by free schools and academies, and the political decision to retain tax breaks for private schools, have a classroom impact which it is impossible for individual teachers and schools to wholly undo.

I am still puzzled on the marking point, by the way. f you want your child's workbooks home daily, when do you want me to mark them? What is it that you DON'T want me to do in order to do this, as there is certainly not enough money to employ more than 1 teacher per class in order than I can mark within the school day?

(Oh, a further point with Pisa - the tests are culturally biased, in that they test specific things which may or may not be in the curriculum in particular countries, and they favour particular question types and educational approaches. They test performance in a very specific narrow band of learning, which would be fine if that was all it was used for but this is wrongly extrapolated to make judgements about a whole education system, which may in fact be extremely successful considered as a whole.

Pisa would be a better measure if
a) a truly random selection of that particular age group was selected for testing, wherever they are educated, with no-one excluded (this would obviously be difficult in countries without good birth and death records, but these exceptions should be made clear to qualify the results)
b) the tests represented the full curriculum and were rigorously assessed and tested for lack of cultural bias)

Every other country expects dc to use appropriate equipment

Sorry, i had missed this one. What is the 'approriate equipment' that you think children are lacking IN SCHOOL?

If I have taken one of the textbooks available to me, selected appropriate work for all or a group of my pupils, made it available to them for use in class (sometimes photocopied, more often displayed on an interactive whiteboard using a visualiser), and they have had all the pencils, pens, rubbers, rulers, glue, exercise books, concrete equipment such as place value counters etc that they need to do that work - how is that 'lacking appropriate equipment'?

Each week I send home appropriate homework of the type best shown by research to improve attainment - daily reading and learning of Maths facts, routine rehearsal of calculation to improve fluency [plus spellings, which we only do to keep parents happy, as we know that type of homework has no impact, though our in-school teaching of spelling most certainly does]. Again, how is this 'lacking appropriate equipment'?

I'd say sharing textbooks at GCSE is fundamentally 'ill equipped'. It's the norm in State Secondaries.

PhilODox I know exactly the English phrase "Practice makes perfect", but sometimes it just make progress (at least that is what I teach my child, so he should not give up even if his work is not perfect after practicing it).

Cant, I can only speak for my school and a few others around here (and only for P1-3).
I don't think I have EVER seen a jotter (as they call them here) marked. At most VERY occasionally there is a comment from the teacher.
We can see the jotters during parents' evening while we wait for our turn and at the end of the year when they are sent home.
Also, I am not sure how the teacher's workload is distributed, but I don't get the impression they spend the whole day in the classroom. The kids get different teachers for different activities and often the teachers job-share.

On another point, to me here education is too politicised, coupled with the obsession of "class" and that has unintended consequences. Whether this system is better worse or the same as other countries where, for exams, there is no nationally standardised testing, I don't know.
One thing for sure, here where I am parents' involvement is neither sought nor welcome.

Dawned,

I can't speak about that one, as i teach in primary.

I have a DS doing GCSE - he has a mixture of textbooks where appropriate, individual copies of English texts, but also an absolutely comprehensive, topic by topic, lesson by lesson, collection of selected material on the school's virtual learning environment. This is particularly useful in e.g. languages, where recorded material, interactive vocabulary and grammar work etc etc may be much more appropriate than a written textbook.

I would worry if DS had neither a textbook NOR a good quality electronic alternative. However, that is not the case.

Arkadia,

Just to describe the situation here - standard state school, England, upper primary.

Every child in my class has an exercise book or folder for every subject. They also have 2 homework folders, and a diary for recording daily reading.

Every piece of work in every subject is marked between every lesson, according to the school's marking policy. The depth of marking does vary, but will always be against the objectives set for that lesson in the planning. Some work is peer or self-marked.

Homework is not marked in detail, because it is assessed through other means e.g. maths fact tests, arithmetic work in maths lessons, reading assessments, the dreaded and useless spelling test that we tried to abolish but parents objected...

(I would say, by the way, that the arrangement and marking I describe is the norm in English primaries. Obviously, where children are too young to read written comments on their work, then the feedback system will be different - and in Reception, much assessment is observational rather than from written work. Instant verbal feedback is obviously one of the most powerful forms of marking, and so in my books, the work which has least marking (we don't mark twice, so if verbal feedback has been given, there is no written marking) may well have had the best and most effective feedback)

I think my daughter's school manages this quite well, without sending books home all the time (where I agree with those saying that causes problems for teachers being able to mark, and risk of books going astray etc). Books are available for you to look through on parents evening before or after appointments with the teacher. There's a "meet the teacher" session start of each new school year where they explain the curriculum and expectations, and a sheet home every term summarising topics for the term and ideas on how to support at home. Also occasional evening sessions for parents where they explain the approach to e.g. Phonics, or maths in KS2.

Maybe some ideas on those lines would be worth suggesting OP, good ways of ensuring parents are up to speed but without chasing round after individual children's books etc?

I think there is a straightforward solution here. If your child is actually using particular text books at school, ask the teacher what they are and buy a copy for home. Most are inexpensive to buy on Amazon. If your son is in Key stage 2, he should be up to looking at the book and telling you " we did these questions on page 20 today" or whatever.

I did not want to cause problem and involve funding, government or Ofsted, etc... I do not want to change the system. I do not want schools to buy books.
All what I would like is to see my child school books (that they already have, it is the books they writing the tasks in each lessons, the books you can go in the school and look at them once in a term).

I do not agree that children do not need homework or practice (whatever I call) in primary school. Instead they need lots of practice, specially from math. They need to master the basics to be able to understand and concentrate the harder thing later on.

When I was a child my teacher told me "you do not know the times tables, until your parents wake you up at night and you can answer the times tables questions quickly".

I think those children who think math is hard or they think they cannot do it (and there are a lot), those children did not have a chance to practice the basics enough. And this is where we parents could help.

Ticking the box, that my son knows his 8 times tables just because he did the 8 times tables in the math lesson does not mean he really knows the times tables. He understand it, but needs a lot of practice to be able to recall the facts quickly.

I agree that looking the topic for the half term on the school website is not enough, because teacher give different work to the children.

I looked at my child math book this week. There was a task 2 weeks ago, where the teacher commented "Oh dear!" and I also saw that my son did not finish that task. So I asked him if he know how to do it. He said yes, because he spoke to the teacher about it. I gave him the same example with different number and he could not do it. Do you think when they go back to the same task in 3 (or whatever) month time in the school to look at the same problem a little deeper will my son be able to concentrate the new things about that topic or just will think "How should I do the basic, I still do not understand". And in this way the gap between the basic of the topic and the details will just widen every time when they go back to the same topic, until we won't sort out the basics. Luckily enough I had a chance to show him how to do it (10 minutes job, it would have been 5 minutes, if I could explain to him in the same day), so he won't be one of the lots of kids who will struggle with this topic next time.

Just to saying he does not learn 1 hour every day, but he would be able to do it and we would do it if I could use that hour efficiently. He reads a lot too and not behind in the school.

I agree that PISA is far from perfect, but one thing it does that some other measures don't do, is that it also looks at social inequality/mobility within the education systems. Where my country 'scores' appallingly.

Is the 'still puzzled on the marking' point to me? I think I said that though I struggled to get my head around it, I've accepted that this is the way things are, and have been looking at the bright sides instead; so I don't 'want' to take the work books home every day. It does feel like it cripples me in my desire to support my child effectively, which feels silly, but I understand that it can't happen, and look at the bright sides instead.

If they were to be sent home, then that would imply a huge cultural shift e.g. more funding for schools so that they can employ more teachers so that the class teacher has time out during the day for marking. Which is not going to happen. And a change to marking policy, that not every written piece of work needs to be marked (because parents will look at it instead...). Again, not going to happen. (Though my DS' school sensibly IMO works a lot with instant oral feedback. Which is more effective for the children's learning than delayed written feedback, and still allows the teacher to see where the child is at and plan next steps).

I understand the constraints the schools are under and do not imagine that an idea like the OP proposed would be a solution, nor in any way practical. What I'm saying is that there is a different culture of schools/education in other places, in which the 'taking home workbooks' thing doesn't just 'work' but would be hard to do without. And that these other systems have advantages and disadvantages compared to how it is done hereabouts. One of the advantages is that it harnesses the willing/available parents' time and abilities, whereas here I feel my willingness and ability to support my DC goes to waste. But that advantage has major consequences too in that social inequalities are further entrenched.

I also understand that lots of parents would not even take out the books from the school bag, but I think it should be the parents choice if they would like to support their children education in this way or not.

Jobshares are usually e.g. 2 days + 3 days. it doesn't mean that the other teacher is paid to work while the other is teaching. Yes, they probably will be at home marking, planning, assessing and worrying about their class, but it doesn't change the fact that there isn't someone to stand in front of the class while the other teacher marks books from the lessons they have taught that day to send home that day.

We welcome parental involvement which works with the school - parents come in to help; they are obviously well-represented on the Governing Body; we run training sessions for them about the methods we use for e.g. maths, reading, grammar; we have a LOT of meetings with individuals. However, i appreciate that this is different across different schools.