Homework routines
October 3, 2008 by Sherry Osborne
Filed under Parenting
Everyone always says that it’s important to establish a homework routine, whether it’s something you take care of right after school, after dinner, or first thing in the morning.
Our routine is pretty straight forward. When my daughter gets home, I usually give her about a half hour to change her clothes, have a snack, and just unwind a bit. Then we settle down for homework time. She’s not old enough yet to do it in her room at a desk, so the homework station right now is our kitchen table. I have a container with pencils and erasers for her written work and another for crayons and pencil crayons for things that need to be colored in.
When it’s time for working, the television and radio are off, and I give my younger daughter some work of her own – either a stack of blank paper or a coloring book – and she draws and scribbles alongside her big sister. It’s actually one of her favorite times of the day, when she gets to do her very own “homework”.
Some days the work goes quickly. Other days it’s a bit slow if she’s tired or if there are a few extra things for her to do. She usually has one work sheet (both sides) for either writing or doing patterns, she has to read a few pages in her book, and sometimes she has to color according to a story to show reading comprehension. Lately, she also has to practice for her weekly spelling tests. The reading hasn’t been very time consuming. She’s currently 45 pages ahead of where she has to be, just because she enjoys reading.
For us, shortly after school is the best solution. Evenings are too busy between cleaning up after dinner, doing bath time, and preparing the next day’s school lunches – plus the kids are both tired by then. Mornings are an absolute NO WAY in our household because we’re up by 6:30 as it is, we’d have to get up at 6 to fit homework in, no thanks. She’s tired enough in the mornings without getting up earlier and trying to write coherently.
What’s your homework routine? I’m especially curious about how it works for working moms. I do work, but from home, so my schedule is flexible enough for me to sit down at 3:30 with her (and I could always bring my laptop to the table if I had a major deadline), so I’ve often wondered how the heck working moms manage to fit it in!
(photo: flickr)
