Homework Help

Lesson 3: Help at Home

Just as teachers need to set the stage for homework success at school, parents also must do their part at home to ensure that students meet with success. Here are some ways for parents to help with homework.

Working at Home

In lesson one we looked some at ways for parents to get organized at home. Just to re-emphasize, setting up a time and place to do homework is very important and effective. See lesson one for ideas on setting up a homework work area and a tool kit.

Should homework time should be supervised time? Parents and teachers may disagree on this, but my feeling has always been that parents need to be available to help their children with homework. But that's where things start to get fuzzy!

Parents should be available to help clarify directions, check answers, suggest problems, which need to be reworked, and encourage neatness and good work habits. Avoid giving your child too much help, or providing the answers to difficult problems.

Most teachers use homework to judge the effectiveness of the day's lessons and to see which skills students need to review and which they have mastered. How children do their homework can have a direct effect on classroom instruction. Your child's teacher will want to know if your child is struggling with a concept, and providing too much help may give the teacher the impression that your child has mastered a concept when he really hasn't. But if a teacher gets a "false" impression of student mastery due to too much "help" at home, important skills that need to be reviewed might be viewed as mastered before they actually are.

Parents need to check with their child's teacher to determine their feeling on parental help at home. We'll consider some homework do's and don'ts in the next section.

Contracts

Some parents and teachers find that a homework contract is useful, especially with students who are having a problem completing homework assignments. Generally a contract is drawn up at school by the teacher, but parents might want to consider a contract also.

Contracts can be set up in many ways. Some are quite simple - just detailing the behaviors the student will demonstrate and the things the parent will do in return. A word of caution - don't set up unattainable goals for your child, and be sure the "reward" fits. Don't offer huge rewards, or rewards you aren't really prepared to give for what is in reality your child's "job" - to do his homework!

See Cholden, Chapter 4 for more on using contracts.