If you assign homework to children in elementary school, make certain that you assign the right work for the right reasons. If you do so, their homework may have nothing to do with their daily assignments in grades K – 6 and everything to do with what they will learn in grades K – 12. There are two issues at play. Homework is almost always contentious, and, because it is contentious, homework time is too valuable to waste on doing more and more class time assignments at home.
Ask educators and parents for their beliefs about assigning homework to children in elementary school and you will get a wide range of answers. You also may get kudos and hate mail.
Educators cite sundry research that supports both pre-learning and reinforcement theories of education as a rationale for assigning homework to young children. Homework assists children to prepare for new learning by introducing new words and concepts and giving all children a similar layer of background information. Some children have an abundance of reading materials and opportunities at home and other children have no materials or opportunities. Some parents read and talk with their children about events in the world and other parents have no time for these. Homework in advance of new instruction gives each child a fair chance for successful learning.
Homework also provides distributed practice of what children learn in class. Long term learning requires 17 to 20 repetitions of the information and skills to be learned, each repetition in a slightly different form. Then, theory tells us, learning needs intermittent repetition to extend its retention. There is not enough time in class to give children these repetitions so homework provides every child with necessary practice of what they learn in school.
However, elementary homework also has a downside. The potential for benefit backfires when children don’t do their homework. Then the teacher is compelled to use class time to create background for learning. Secondly perhaps foremost, when children leave school they are ready for play. Doing homework robs their play time and many children just cannot give their homework much attention.
Parents either cheerlead or are on the warpath regarding homework. Some parents believe that children in the US need every available opportunity to become competitive with their international peers. These parents cite PISA and TIMSS reports and the OECD findings that declare the failure of US schools to educate children to the same levels as schools in Singapore, Finland, and Czechoslovakia. However, for every pro-homework parent there are several who are anti. They believe that elementary teachers should take care of all learning in school. The assignment of homework makes parents into “homework Nazis.” And, homework detracts from family time.
Talk. Talk. Talk. Rather than rave or rage about elementary school homework, we need to turn the question from today into a statement about tomorrow. Homework should be about the end game. The end game is helping children to build large, real world vocabularies, expanding their virtual background knowledge beyond their community and chronological age, and enabling them to process information in new and unique ways. These three ends will not be achieved by doing homework tonight that reviews yesterday’s lessons or prepares for tomorrow’s classes. So, let yesterday and tomorrow take care of themselves. Use homework to advance children toward the end game.
In this blog, we will talk about words.
If real estate is location, location, location, the ability to understand information and express yourself is vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. Those who have a broad, real world vocabulary are able to read and understand technical and informational materials because they are not stymied by words they do not recognize or know. They either know the words or know how to decipher the word due to their school-based vocabulary training. This advantage allows them access to advanced education, jobs and employment advancement that are closed to those whose lack of vocabulary leave them only with a scratch of the head and “I don’t know.”
The advantage of vocabulary begins almost at birth and some think it even begins before birth. The advantage is a child’s accessibility to words that are spoken or read even if a child does not know the meaning of the words art at first. Children whose parents read to them on a consistent basis, talk with them about what is happening at home and in the community, and take them to libraries, museums and parks at a young age begin to develop a large, real world vocabulary. When these children begin school, they have an extremely significant learning advantage because they know many of the words that appear in school lessons and assignments. Research has proven this advantage to be a consistent truth.
“There is a gap in vocabulary knowledge between economically disadvantaged and economically advantaged children that begins in preschool and is an important correlate of poor school performance. (p. 526)
Consider the following results from some seminal studies in the field:
• First-grade children from higher SES groups know about twice as many words as lower SES children (Graves, Brunetti, & Slater, 1982; Graves & Slater, 1987).
• High school seniors near the top of their class know about four times as many words as their lower-performing classmates (Smith, 1941).
• High performing third graders had vocabularies about equal to the lowest-performing twelfth graders (Smith, 1941).
The end result is that enriched environments promote vocabulary development. Good readers read more, which in turn helps them become even better readers with even larger vocabularies. Poor readers read less, which contributes to their becoming poorer readers with more limited vocabularies. In effect, “the rich readers get richer and the poor readers get poorer.”
http://www.education.com/reference/article/socioeconomic-status-vocabulary-development/
Schools cannot affect the language development of children before they enroll in school. But schools can and must do all they can to build every child’s vocabulary once they are in school.
“As Mark Twain said, ‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.’”
I would modify Twain’s reference. An adequate vocabulary is knowing the difference between lightning and lightening or even enlightening. In the same sentence, a large, real world vocabulary is as powerful as lightning in enlightening a person’s understanding of the world.
“But it’s not enough to just know the right word – you also need to remember it when it’s time to use it. This is harder than it seems. Keeping your vocabulary ready and agile takes practice. It’s easy to slip into patterns, using dull, pallid words and monotonous sentence structures, overlooking colorful synonyms and dramatic grammatical fireworks.”
This is the job of the school; to enrich every child’s vocabulary and give all children meaningful ways to exercise their vocabulary.
http://sojournersong.blogspot.com/2007/10/value-of-vocabulary.html
The first rule for elementary school homework is “Words are our work when we learn from words!” Yesteryear’s word walls live again, though they are not limited to classroom walls. Words can live on notecards in pockets and be recorded on MP3 players and displayed on tablets and laptops. They can be e-mailed and texted. They can be sung and rhymed and drawn in color. A new word can be learned from TV commercials, the evening news, a post on a computer, a song that is streamed, and from eavesdropping in the grocery store. We are surrounded by words and children need to be helped to hear and read and pay attention to all these words. Especially, children who do not begin school with a large vocabulary.
A word is just the beginning. Some word enthusiasts want to begin with a predetermined list of basal words. Nah! The end game begins with the words that children bring to the game – their words. When children use the words they see, hear and read, they are invested in understanding the word they bring to the lesson. Then, teachers help children create word families. Prefixes and suffixes are added. Synonyms and antonyms are added. Homonyms add richness. It does not take long to geometrically grow a child’s vocabulary if educators use words that are meaningful to children and use best linguistic practices.
Class time should be committed to having children tell their classmates the new words they have read or seen or heard. And, to giving real world definitions to these words. This is not a great amount of daily class time; perhaps ten minutes. But, the payback over time is like compounded interest in the bank. Once defined, linguistics manipulates the letters and new words and new meanings flow.
The second rule for learning words is “Make learning words fun!” There are so many exciting ways to introduce new words and ideas to children that a child should be able to use any of these to achieve the end game of a large, real world vocabulary. Watch television to see the world. Watch videos to understand stories. Listen to music to learn how words work together. Play games that have specific terms. Solve problems to use words precisely and for a purpose. Go the park to play and learn the words of nature. Or, go to the park to learn how to socialize and use words to collaborate with others. Test your parents rather than have them test you.
Bah, humbug! to word lists that teachers of old used to copy from the back to basal readers. Double humbug! to the blind memorization of those words and weekly quizzes of those words. Booyah! to the words that children find interesting, that they laugh about, or that they wonder about. Kudos to games that teachers connive for children to say a word and then talk about it.
The end game does not care how children learn new words and grow their real world vocabulary. Well, it does want them to learn safely in every definition of that important word – safely. But, it does not care if they use television, video games, hand-held devices, stay at home or go out safely into the community. The end game wants children to explore their language and their world. When they begin to do this at a young age, they will do it for their live time. And, remarkably, these words and a child’s ability to learn about and from new words will advance their learning of literature, history and science and every other subject dependent upon words and language.
Is this homework as usual for children in elementary school? Not so much. Is this life learning for these children? Will growing a great vocabulary while in elementary school help all children be better prepared for the specific subjects they will study in secondary school? Can children who begin school with a lesser vocabulary build a powerful vocabulary using purposeful homework? You bet to each of these. That is the end game.