What About Traditional Daily Assignments?

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RedRose64

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Mar 15, 2007
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What About Traditional Daily Assignments?

Research has consistently shown that parental involvement in a child's learning is a key factor in that child's achievement in school. With the reality of the test driven world of education, many parents expect what they were given in school for homework, familiar daily or weekly assignments. I do agree with the rationale behind these daily assignments:
  • Homework reinforces skills, concepts and information learned in class.
  • Homework prepares students for upcoming class topics.
  • Homework teaches students to work independently and develop self-discipline.
  • Homework encourages students to take initiative and responsibility for completing a task.
  • Homework allows parents to have an active role in their child's education and helps them to evaluate their child's progress.
  • Homework activities relate what is learned in school to children's lives outside of school and helps to connect school learning to the real world.
But I believe these daily homework assignments should be varied and meaningful, not always rote practice work.
To encourage authentic writing for homework assignments; I use a class mascot, his sleepover bag and a journal for students to write about the mascot's visit to their home. I send home the classroom digital camera so students can photograph their home, family, special events and vacations. We print their photos on the class computer and use them to support their writing. Students interview family members for information to share with the class. We also write poetry, lists, headlines, photo captions, book reviews and more.
To reinforce practice with their word wall words, students learn how to rainbow write, triangle write, happy face write, staircase write, box it write and sort their word wall words by number of letters, syllables, and vowels. I have included a Spelling Ideas printable with examples of all of these ideas and more so you can use it with your students.
To practice math skills and problem solving I send home math games with my students to play with parents or siblings. I assign homework that can easily be modified depending on the students' level of understanding. I also have Family Game Night. Students are allowed to borrow a board game from my classroom collection to take home for the weekend. These games include a memory game from the National Museum of Art, Boggle, Clue for Kids, Scrabble for Kids and more. Students never realize that they are learning about art, counting, problem solving, reading and following directions while they're having fun.
Most importantly I want my first grade students to be reading every single night to improve their word recognition, comprehension, fluency and word attack skills. I am thankful that our school has a fantastic guided reading book library that almost all teachers at Metz use on a daily basis. This allows my students to take home the same books we read in class during guided reading, and reread them dozens of times over several weeks, improving their language arts skills. Students read the same books during independent reading time in class, so they receive further literacy support with these same books just in case an adult is unable to support their reading at home.
 
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