Formally withdrawing child from homework

onlyroz

My son is nearly 8 and I've told his teacher that I think the school gives out too much homework. In general, say that he's given 10 calculations to do for his maths, I'll be happy if he gets through half of them and the teacher can lump it if that's not good enough.

Last week he was asked to:

- Read three times
- Practice his times-tables
- Practice his spellings
- Write an introduction to a story
- Complete a maths exercise
- Prepare for a school writing exercise

I do the reading with him in the car just before I take him into school. We practice the times tables while I'm driving him to school. The spelling test practice tends to go out the window. Then the larger writing and maths exercises will get done over the course of a few evenings early in the week (they need to be handed in on thursday). Each of these usually involve plenty of tears and stress on both our parts, because he's meant to complete the tasks independently but usually needs quite a bit of help.

This week it took him two hours to write two paragraphs for his story, at which point I gave up and said he'd done enough.

bestpud

Can I just say I'm interested just because I am.

I can understand people wondering why I've asked so I've answered, but really my daughter's situation is irrelevant - I'm interested in anyone who has done this, whatever their reason.

valk_scot

bestpud wrote: »

She did it all during school hours.

That astonishes me too, my DS has an absolutely jam packed timetable, no free periods for doing any homework during school hours. He's in fifth year atm, doing Scottish Highers, he normally does about 2 hours of set homework a night five nights per week on average plus reading and now that he's coming up to exam time he's got to add some serious revision time on top of that. He's hoping for five A pass Highers though, he wants a First from a good uni too!

koalamummy

bestpud wrote: »

She did it all during school hours.

Do I know you???

Only asking as I never had any homework left to o at home and still hd time left over to help classmates who were struggling......I also ot a first in my initial degree subject as well as a doctorate despite having to work lots of hours to pay my rent and feed myself.

I went on to do a totally different degree in nursing, and also achieved my doctorate in that subject before my 30th.

I am not that spectacularly intelligent, or even anything close....I just learned to focus and concentrate at an early age as I was part of a big noisy family.

claire16c

bestpud wrote: »

She did it all during school hours.

Wouldn't she have been in lessons in school hours? I don't understand why you would have spare time at school.

bestpud

meritaten wrote: »

I don't get this - the school staff think your daughter should do less homework? working on this at home was taking far longer than expected?

in that case why aren't the school re-assessing the group your daughter is in and either reducing her schoolwork or homework? Why is this down to you?
If your daughter is struggling it is surely up to the teaching staff to re-assess her? and call in additional aid?
I agree - spending 'several' hours doing homework is not right. not for your daughter or for you. there is something very wrong and it isn't with you or your daughter.

It's all SATS at the moment but probably best not to get me started on that!

It's sorted for now.

It was a SENCO who suggested it because the workload will increase again at secondary.

It just got me thinking if you know what I mean?

valk_scot

One of the best bits of the Scottish education system is that you never know when the SATS are coming up, the kids are just presented as and when by the school and you only find out your child has done one if they tell you. No stress, no fuss and a far more accurate snapshot of progress than being crammed specially for them. I'd be hard pressed to tell you what stage my DD is at just now, I'd have to look at her last report card.

koalamummy

claire16c wrote: »

Wouldn't she have been in lessons in school hours? I don't understand why you would have spare time at school.

Unfortunately if you are one of the children with a more natural aptitude for a subject you tend to find that you spend a lot of time sitting bored beyond belief waiting for the rest of the group to catch up.

It adds up to an awful lot of time. M:(

meritaten

koalamummy wrote: »

Do I know you???

Only asking as I never had any homework left to o at home and still hd time left over to help classmates who were struggling......I also ot a first in my initial degree subject as well as a doctorate despite having to work lots of hours to pay my rent and feed myself.

I went on to do a totally different degree in nursing, and also achieved my doctorate in that subject before my 30th.

I am not that spectacularly intelligent, or even anything close....I just learned to focus and concentrate at an early age as I was part of a big noisy family.

as I said earlier - my son completed both his classwork and a his homework in school. but then, he never messed around in free periods or library time. so he says!

koalamummy

Sorry iPad has struck again. I am not quite as illiterate as my posts come across. This model however seems determined that it will only allow me to type a number of words per minute without removing half of the letters! :eek: