I don’t know if homework has changed and gotten more intense since I was six years old, almost three decades ago (let me pause for a moment to say “holy shit” to that). Maybe I just don’t remember properly.
Hayley has homework every day that she goes to school and there’s quite a bit of it, though the teacher always says to use our judgment and not do all of it if our kids are too tired or frustrated. The reading part is fine. She has a reader that she is supposed to work her way through every day, except that Hayely is such a good reader that she read the whole thing in one day about two months ago. The other reading homework is such that the teacher sends each child home with a small book and they have to read it, fill out the log, and then send it back for a new one. That, too, is easy because it’s really basic compared to the reading she does on her own. She also has to do flash cards but we don’t usually do them either.
And really, thank GOD we don’t have to do the reader or slowly go over the little book or do flash cards for reading. Because the other homework is long enough, thanks very much. She usually has a two-sided sheet to do each day. On the front is something that requires writing, spelling, reading a brief instruction and following it (such as “draw a picture of two brown bears, three white rabbits, and one yellow bird”). Sometimes she has to write a story with four or five sentences, such as this:
On the flip side is her math homework. Most of it has been pretty basic and easy but today I had to actually stop her because she wasn’t getting it (she missed a day last week due to being sick, so it’s possible she wasn’t there for the lesson) and I couldn’t explain it to her in a way that made sense to her. It involves number patterns and it would look something like this: 5 __ __ 23 29 35 __ __ and so one. It just seems like such a huge leap for six-year-olds to figure out how to tell that the pattern is skipping by six and to then fill in the blanks accordingly.
After five out of 12 exercises, I realized that a) I was pretty much answering it for her and b) she still wasn’t getting it and she was also c) getting really frustrated with herself, I closed her folder and told her to forget it for today. I wrote a note to the teacher to tell her why it was incomplete and asked her if she could review it with Hayley at some point during the day to help her out.
I had a great deal of trouble with math. I was okay for the basic math, but word problems in grade six totally threw me, especially when I was often able to figure it out but couldn’t show my work to my teacher’s satisfaction. Then I was okay for grades seven and eight. And after that? I hit algebra in grade nine, and you might as well have asked me to understand quantum physics. I want to make sure Hayley gets a good firm grasp on math any time she has any trouble with it and I don’t want her to start hating it in grade one, so I figure it’s best to have the teacher – who has been taught to teach things in different ways – help her out.
But seriously, I do not remember grade one being this intense at all. And the pace is only going to pick up in the new year. Yikes! At this rate, she’ll hit that algebra in grade five!
Algebra in grade five is honestly not that much of a leap, other countries teach it even earlier than that. If we don’t know how to teach it though, and it’s pretty obvious that our schools are generally doing a pretty horrific job, stuffing more and more homework down kids’ throats probably won’t help. It always annoys me when I hear about kids this age getting homework. There’s no need, and there is NO evidence that it helps in the slightest.
I like her story though. 🙂
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That looks about what my son did in 1st grade too. In first grade, my son was required to count by 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, and 10s up to 100 (on the flip side, it’s great for multiplication).
At least here, they start word problems in 2nd grade (little ones) and they start some basic algebra in 3rd. But, they don’t call it algebra. I bet you now that Hayley’s probably doing some algebra:
____ + 5 = 7 Switch the blank with an x and it’s an algebraic expression. 😀
I think that kids are smarter today then when I was a kid. Or they have just learned to teach them better. I remember just playing and watching TV – I didn’t have all the “stuff” that kids have today. I don’t even think I had homework until 4th grade. (My son is in 2nd grade and he brought home this HUGE packet of homework this week. I think there are almost 30 worksheets. And not easy quick ones either.
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My mom teaches first grade (for reference, we’re in California… which happens to be next-to-last of all the states in education spending) and as her occasional Teacher’s Aide, I think I can agree with confidence that that’s WAY too advanced. The kids in her class get worksheets with problems like “Count by 5s. Fill in the blanks: 15, 20, __, __, 35”. A lot of them STILL get it wrong, but I’m not sure if that’s a failure to follow directions or honest confusion.
You might know… how does one tell the difference between a kid who’s struggling to understand the lesson, and one who’s resisting because he’s bored out of his mind? Somehow I also ended up Teacher’s Aide for the Special Ed class, and am still trying to figure out what in the world I’m doing. XD
My sister sends her kids to a Waldorf School; looks like they won’t have any reading or math until they are 7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
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[ 5 __ __ 23 29 35 __ __ ]
Are most of Hayley’s series problems like the above?
If so you could have her answer the questions:
What do you have to do to get from 23 to 29?
and
What do you have to do to get from 29 to 35?
If you did the same thing (add 6) then you are counting by 6.
Add 6 to 35 and then add 6 to that total. Going the other way you would have to have smaller numbers so you subtract 6 from 23 and then subtract 6 more from that number.
One problem isn’t going to get the procedure in anyone’s head, but if this problem was counting by 6s another problem might be counting by 2s, 4s or 7s where step one is to see how to get from one number to another one right next to it. Good luck.
Good for you for writing a note to her teacher!
My daughter is in kindergarten. She brings home homework daily. When you leave the house at 7am, and don’t get home until after 6pm, and are the only parent in the house, often homework gets put on the back burner. Sometimes it’s just not possible to be able sit down and help her complete her homework (from start to finish) if there’s too much. We have roughly 2.5 hours to get through dinner-time, bath-time and bedtime routine before ‘lights out’ at 8:30pm. Quite often she is too sleepy prior to bedtime, so homework-time just doesn’t happen.
Thanks for your thoughts everyone!
The teacher sent a note back saying she did go over it with Hayley today but not to worry too much since they will re-visit it in the new year.
Richard – that’s pretty much how I explained it too but it wasn’t working. Maybe she was just tired, she had a bad cold over the weekend, so maybe that was fogging her up. We’ll see how it goes next time.
Fraizerbaz – That’s unbelievable. I’ve often wondered about kids who have daycare after school, how are they supposed to go home and do their homework unless you cut out any kind of quality time. And daily homework in kindergarten is NUTS.
Toad has been bringing home homework since first grade as well. He’s in second and now has a sheet of math homework every day, and a problem-solving sheet of math on Thursdays. They also do what we used to call Mad Minutes every day – the new theory HERE about math is that memorizing is the best, so they’re working on memorizing everything.
He also has reading to do pretty much every day as well. In the last week he hasn’t had any, and I’m not sure why not.
As an aside – I’m actually kinda shocked the homework is in English!
Randi – she brings home folders from French class with songs and vocabulary words, but she doesn’t have any actual sheet homework for that yet because they just started in French this year. She is tested on the vocabulary words once a week (and she’s doing great!) but they’re keeping it very casual for the first year. I assume she’ll get actual homework for it next year.
When I was in school I started off in French right away and it was all day long but the policy has changed (unless it’s a full French school obviously) and Kindergarten is completely in English to help them ease into school without having to worry about learning in a whole new language on top of all the other changes.