Hate homework!

[chicfille]

Yet another week of stroppy arguments leaving daughter sulking and me steaming! The reason... homework. She probably gets as much as any other 7-year-old in France - weekly spellings and a poem to rote-learn, plus reading - and it's a constant struggle to get it done.

In Year 1 last year in the UK she had a small amount of homework each weekend, which got done with only a minimum of fuss. I can't help thinking that she's too young to have the amount of homework she gets here, alongside such long and intensive days at school. It's demanding stuff too - some quite abstract poems, and some tough spellings.

The upshot is that she's liking school less and less. She's got lots of friends, is bright, a fast learner and doing well at school here but she is more stressed now than she ever was in the UK (as am I!) and I'm worried about the long-term effects of all this homework on her attitude to school and learning.

Any wisdom, anyone?

[Tresco]

"Any wisom, anyone?"

Errm, no, just memories.

Hated homework, I did the bits I was good at, and copied the maths on the bus? This did me no good. The people who copied the things I was good at, probably the same.

I hear these stories about children having 2  hours homework, every night, after getting home at 6.15, and it makes me sad, very sad. I would guess that after a while it becomes habit, the children get used to it and they can do it quicker. All their mates are in the same boat. Please, some 'old' hand, say this is true?

tresco

 

 

 

[Battypuss]

Been there done it; yes the kids get faster and seem to regard it as normal after a while. I might not agree with the amount/sort of homework, but there's no escaping it. Failure to comply with the rules here will only end in more homework and more tears. Just accept it as fact, whether or not you agree and try and persuade your child to do the same...

[opas]

Can only repeat what Battypuss says...just do it, If she doesn`t like our `smart` youngest didn`t one time, she may well get it to do/learn at lunchtime or be sent to another Class during the day as punishment....then get it in the neck fom her sibling if it happens to be her class she ends up in!  I too find that for the age group the spellings are difficult......Mr O admits he couldn`t spell half of them, and the `poesies` are rather strange Mrs O

[cary]

Our children have only been here 3 months.  Our 7 year old gets text to read each night and words to learn, our 10 year old gets a book to read most nights and has to do a review on it! Bit tricky when their language isn't that great at the mo but its getting easier.  And i have as much moaning here when they are asked to do homework as i did in the Uk only in the Uk it was only once a week!

[Val_2]

Wait till she gets to collège and then Lycée,she won't like it then I can tell you, plus all the projects they have to do with others outside school hours.

[Mistral]

I wish my 7 year old got more reading to do. Every couple of weeks she has about 15 pages of her bok to read at home. I would much rather she read a page or so a day.

Other than that, she usually has a "sound sheet" to read and maybe a couple of sums to do. We don't get too many poems this year, maybe two a term. They're OK this year. Last year they were a bit wierd (strong lack of rhyming)

I'm more worried about her brother. He is in a mixed CM1/CM2 class and most nights all he has is "read the history lesson" It's done in 5 minutes. He is going to get such a shock next year in collège. I've actually started him on those holiday books, so that he has something to do. (and that he hasn't finished working too long before his sister)

As Val says, once they're in collège, it really piles on.

 

[opas]

Daughter in CM2 was doing her homework last night, dad helped with the maths(not my strong point) after that it was text writing, she then asked me the meaning of a word, youngest was listening and said ` in Iron`?

Got out the Dictionary `hell` the word was enfer(sp)  The story she had to write was ` MY LIFE IN HELL`  !!!!!!   Mrs O

[chicfille]

[quote]Can only repeat what Battypuss says...just do it, If she doesn`t like our `smart` youngest didn`t one time, she may well get it to do/learn at lunchtime or be sent to another Class during the day as p...[/quote]

The worst that seems to happen if homework is not done to expected standard is the humiliation that goes with being told off in front of the whole class - something that my daughter is so frightened of that she does always gets it done in the end. Just a shame the process has to involve so much nagging and sulking.

This week's poem is the worst yet - completely wierd subject with no rhymes or even rhythm to improve it. Spellings are nearly always hard but since I complained about the sheer number (up to 40 some weeks) there have been fewer.

The reading books are terrible! Really old fashioned, portraying dull sexist stereotypes and with no storyline, so my daughter isn't enjoying them either, though she loves reading in English.

As a result it's really hard to drum up enthusiasm for schoolwork these days - makes me really sad too.

[Jo53]

Funny how things differ between schools. My son (almost 7) is in CP and has five or six spellings a week, plus a couple of paragraphs of reading every night and the occasional poem. The poems so far have been quite good; not too weird and not too twee. The reading books - well, completely the opposite of what you describe, Chicfille. They are about children who change into toads, walk on the moon, put the teacher in the aquarium (yes, really). They aren't really stories. Quite surreal and subversive - though incredibly confusing for less bright kids I'm sure. The problem is that they stay on the same book for about 8 weeks at a time (and they're not that long), so no matter how interesting the text, my son is bored with it after three weeks or so. The reading homework is always passages that they've already done to death in the classroom. Recently I've found some French story books of the right level and he reads those to me instead, which he finds more rewarding.

Jo

[SaligoBay]

They do spend a long time on the books, I hadn't really thought about it, because my son's fairly autonome with his homework and very rarely asks for help, just now and again with a bit of Maths where maybe the explanations aren't clear.

He doesn't seem to be doing any poésie in Sixième, and out of the blue he asked the other day "What was the point of all those poems we had to learn?".   He says they never read them again once they've been tested on memorising them.   And I didn't really know the answer!   I don't think it makes them any more appreciative of literature or anything like that, so I suppose it's just to get them using their memory?

[opas]

Jo53, CP and CE1 are worlds apart as far as I can see. In CP my daughter had Dagobart book for the full year , I found It quite amusing (about a king who did every thing back to front) but also informative...baking ,baking things and little tests. CE1  well the work is a bit Dali-ish, some strange poems to say the least.

SB My thoughts on the memorising are that they are in training to be fuctionaires! remember everything by rote, but if asked anything that isn`t written down and needs thinking about , then they are lost!

Mrs O

[Mistral]

I agree about the memorising thing. I think the poems are there to train their memories, not to give them an appreciation of poetry nor to inspire them to try to do the same. So much depends on the teacher's choice. One year we only got maurice carême and Jacques prevert. The next year it was wierd unrhythmic verse (there was one about a rider  that had impossible vocabulary, I mean "toque" for a 7 year old?!)

I'm not necessarily against something (anything) that trains their memories. But I'd be happier with work on long-term memory.

This year's CE1 books are quite fun but they do seem to read them forever. And I find it strange that they just seem to read them without taking things further. For example we had one recently about a princess who contacted a fairy godmother by e-mail and while waiting for the reply to download went red with anger, green with something else etc. It was a fun idea but there was no "inventive writing/ self expression" using that as a starting point.

[TiffanyS<P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=1><U>hometown.aol.co.uktiffanystacpooleanimalmatters.html<U><FONT><P>]

[quote]Yet another week of stroppy arguments leaving daughter sulking and me steaming! The reason... homework. She probably gets as much as any other 7-year-old in France - weekly spellings and a poem to rot...[/quote]

Rewind one year, change the part about lots of friends and your daughter and mine sound identical.

A year on from the worst of the arguments, my daughter has stopped rowing with me about homework, now she just tries to ignore it and frequently gets lower marks on homework related tests. She is becoming apathetic about school which is disturbing and jumps at any opportunity not to go.

Depressing, huh? If you find any wisdom beyond scrapping the system (not just here) and starting again, let me know....