HOMEWORK HELP FOR KIDS
RESEARCH SITES FOR CHILDREN
HOW TO SEARCH THE NET
FOR HOMEWORK ANSWERS
Parents - What are you doing?
Are you helping your kid do their homework or are you doing the homework for your child? If your child is savvy enough to be reading this page then they can look for help on the net. If they are looking for information to answer questions from the teacher then they are going to be using the computer for research. If they are doing research then the parent can help them out by showing them where to look for the information.
Start by showing them that there are different kinds of search engines for particular kinds of information and there are actual real live librarians online that can also help you.
In Homework Wars, Student Wins a Battle: More Time to Unwind on Vacation
Slight and bookish, looking more like Harry Potter than Voldemort, 15 year old Sean Gordon-Loebl has accomplished what more menacing students can only fantasize about: He convinced Stuyvesant High School
in Manhattan, one of the nations most competitive (cynics might say cutthroat), to put limits on homework. It needed to restrict homework during vacations. He pointed out what seemed obvious that long vacation projects ruin the chance to recharge, catch up on sleep and spend time with family and friends.
The principal, agreeing that vacations are down time and should not be used to heap on homework, responded by suggesting to teachers that brushing up on Shakespeare would be a fine spring-break
assignment; writing an entire play would not.
Stuyvesant which uses a rough guideline of a half-hour of homework per night for each course many children come from immigrant homes where their parents do not speak English and work two jobs.
But Stuyvesant, a selective public school, is a rarefied world where students are being groomed for top colleges, so homework rules may be tailored differently.
Like curriculum in the culture wars, homework is a
stand-in for other issues the demands we make of children in an ever more competitive global village.
Administrators facing the gun-to-the-head approach of the federal No Child Left Behind and college admissions keep loading on homework-heavy Advanced Placement courses.
The Case Against Homework, The End of Homework and The Homework Myth, which corroborate the argument of homeworks detractors. From the principal of Oak Knoll Elementary School in Menlo Park, Calif., declaring that one hour a night is more than enough for 9- and 10-year-olds. Large amounts of homework stifle motivation, diminish a childs love of learning, turn reading into a chore, negatively affect the quality of family time, diminish creativity, and turn learning into
drudgery, the principal, David Ackerman, wrote.
Those who would virtually banish homework lose track of a reality pointed out by Eric Grossman, Stuyvesants assistant principal for English who has seniors read long novels like Moby Dick. Thats not something we can do in school in 40-minute chunks each day and discuss, he said. One of the overarching goals in our department
is to have students become lifelong independent readers.
Like most education fashions, the homework load has fluctuated, rising with Sputnik and 1983s A Nation at Risk report and dropping during an era of relative indulgence like the 60s. At the moment, most parents seem satisfied, according to an Associated Press-AOL
poll conducted by Knowledge Networks from Jan. 13 to 23, 2006. It showed that 57 percent of parents felt children were assigned the right amount of homework; only 19 percent said they had too much and 23 percent said too little.
Harris Cooper, chairman of the education program at Duke University, who has studied the research on homeworks effectiveness, said nightly practice makes sense for foreign languages or mathematics because it solidifies confidence. The research, he said, also suggests that homework improves scores on end-of-year tests.
Dr. Cooper likes the 10-minute rule: increase the amount by 10 minutes per grade so that a third grader is doing 30 minutes, a fourth grader 40 minutes. He likes assignments students are curious to do rather than doing them because of external rewards or punishment and affectionately cited one his wife, a teacher, gives.
She hands first graders disposable cameras to photograph household objects that look like letters a folded pair of glasses that resembles the letter B, for example.
