During that time, she said, she started to research homework and found the case against it for young elementary pupils very compelling. She and some of her colleagues at the school located about 90 miles south of San Francisco decided a good way to do that would be to eliminate those homework packets. “Teachers were only given two reams of paper a month at my school, so we were forced to cut back,” said Knapp. But that all changed 10 years ago during the Great Recession. Still, some kindergarten teachers remain firm in their opposition to mandatory homework.īarbara Knapp used to assign her kindergarten pupils at Bradley Elementary School in Corralitos, Calif., weekly homework packets. “We want them to know what their children are learning at school, we want them to know how they’re doing in school, if the work is too hard, if it’s too easy, we want them to be able to support what the kids are learning at school at home as well.” Eliminating Packets “We feel that this is a connection that we want with parents,” said Holly Hawthorne, the school’s principal. The other 15 minutes is spent doing things like dictating a story to their parents using words that start with a sound they’ve been learning in class or exercises that involve circling that letter. For kindergartners who can’t read yet, that means their parents are expected to read to them. Kindergartners there are expected to do 30 minutes of homework a night, Monday through Thursday.Įvery student at the school is expected to spend 15 minutes reading a night. I don’t think she was getting anything out of it and I think it was way too much.”īut such concerns aren’t shared by administrators or parents at Arlington Traditional School, a countywide elementary school in Arlington, Va., with a waiting list of parents eager for their children to attend. “What she was getting for homework was more busywork. “I felt that it was inappropriate for that age,” said Orti. Orti said Mia spent 30 minutes reading every night and an hour on the packet. “She could read the words, but she had no idea what they meant,” said Orti. She describes her daughter as a quick learner who was already reading in kindergarten but still needed her help with word problems and science worksheets. Orti said the packet included work on phonics, spelling, reading comprehension, and social studies. But that’s not stopping educators in many places from assigning homework.ĭelilah Orti said that every Monday her daughter, Mia, a kindergartner last year in the Miami-Dade Public Schools system in Florida, received a homework packet with about 25 worksheets that were due at the end of that week. ![]() Those guidelines don’t even mention kindergarten. In high school, students may exceed that recommendation depending on the difficulty of the courses they choose. So children in 2nd grade would have 20 minutes, those in 3rd grade would have 30 minutes, and so on. Instead, both the National Education Association and the National PTA endorse Cooper’s so-called 10-minute rule, which calls for roughly 10 minutes of homework a night per grade level beginning in 1st grade. Studies by researchers including Harris Cooper, a Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor who wrote The Battle Over Homework, have consistently shown that homework has minimal academic benefits for children in the early-elementary years. That’s a question a lot of parents are asking, especially when it comes to the youngest pupils. ![]() “The first week he went to school he asked us why he was having to do schoolwork at home.” “He doesn’t like it,” said Sheppard, who lives in Pulaski, Va.
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