Welcome back! It’s that time of year again; time for soccer practice, ballet classes and school to start! We are in the second week of September, and right in the swing of things.
I wanted to share some things that I have learned as I started this school year that might be helpful for you at home as you start your school year and get back into a routine with your little ones. First of all, I hope you and your children had a great summer, filled with outside activities. Even though it was summer, I hope you still found time to read with your children too. We read a lot this summer, and took numerous books out of the library. My kids used their canvas bags from book shopping day to transport their books to and from the library, and to bring their books on vacation and to camp. Now we are back into a school schedule, and this includes homework! Homework: love it or hate it, it’s a part of life. I’d like to talk about how you can help your child with homework in general, but especially reading homework. First, set a schedule. Does your child need a break and a snack after school before he/she sits down to work? Perhaps your child can come home and immediately start working. Maybe your child needs to have some time to play and can do homework after dinner. Or maybe, your child needs to work in small chunks: do math then play and come back to reading and spelling later. Once you figure out what works for your child, try to stick to that schedule. The second thing you can do is help your child set up a quiet homework space. Get a special container (an old shoebox works well) that holds all the materials he/she might need for homework: pencils, erasers, colored pencils or markers, glue and tape. The container should be in a place where your child can independently reach it and move it to the quiet location for homework. Our quiet location is at the kitchen counter. During homework time, all music and electronics are turned off. Studies have shown that most students need a quiet environment to work. They also need a flat surface. Lying down on a bed is not the best place to do math pages. Lounging on the sofa is not ideal for spelling. They need to be able to sit up, get oxygen to their brain and take on homework! The third thing you can do is offer assistance when needed. I am usually preparing dinner or working on my work when my kids are doing homework. I am there to help and keep them focused on the task at hand. I give strategies like do what you know first, then come back to the tricky ones. I prod them along and make sure they aren’t daydreaming. I feed them healthy snacks as they are working to keep them going. When it comes to reading homework, prepare to be more present. My fourth grader can read silently in her head with her own timer, so she just starts it and does it completely on her own. My first grader, on the other hand, would just stare at the pictures and not read the words if I let him do reading homework independently. To help him, I created a special box that holds books for reading homework. This saves us time and we don’t have to look through a whole bookshelf of books searching for the right one for him. I set a 15 minute timer and sit next to him on the sofa (he’s sitting up, not lounging). He reads aloud to me, and sometimes we partner read. He reads between two and three easy readers in 15 minutes. We talk about the stories and compare a few if they are from the same series. We are loving the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems right now. We are one week into this routine, and so far, it seems to be working for us. Creating a routine and sticking to it as much as possible should help make homework a bit less stressful.
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AuthorMy name is Laura Coffin, and I am the reading specialist at Lake Placid Elementary School. I have a BA from William Smith College and a M.Ed. in Reading from Lesley University. I also hold a Wilson Language Level I certification. I teach reading, writing and spelling strategies to help all students! Follow me on twitter @lgaetacoffin Archives
December 2017
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