At Lark Hill we believe in parents as partners and trying to involve mums and dads, grandparents and carers as much as possible. We also believe that practise makes better.
However, childhood, play and having fun are vital components of growing up and learning.
With all of that in mind, homework is designed to give children opportunities to practise key skills with parents without intruding too much into family time. Moreover we hope that reading with your child is an enjoyable part of shared family time. Our RWI scheme for children learning phonics and securing all of the letter-sound relationships they will need to be confident, fluent readers ensures that children will only read words in books sent home featuring sounds they have already been introduced to. This ensures they experience success as a reader and makes reading at home enjoyable, removing threat and excessive difficulty. Once children have secured all of the sounds they progress onto more challenging (and more interesting) books but all of the research and our experience shows that reading with your child (hearing them read and reading to them) is the best possible thing you can do to help your child even once they can read independently. Staff are always happy to model how to most effectively share stories with children. For those reasons reading is worth most points on the homework grids.
The next priorities are around spelling and basic number facts. Your child will have a list of spellings or a spelling focus which they can practise ahead of a weekly test. Please help them with these. It is also vital that children learn number bonds and times table facts. They will have lots of opportunities to practise number bonds (pairs of numbers that make 10 and that make other quantities: 6, 7, 8, 9, 20 etc). Later they will have lots of opportunities to practise times tables. Please see the Parents’ Times Table Tool Kit in the Maths section of this website for great ideas to internalise these facts (Curriculum section). Playing these games and singing these songs is easy and will help enormously the more times they do it.
If children are doing all of the above (reading, spellings, maths) every week then they are covering the basics and doing a good job. We expect children to hand in two pieces of homework a week, but this can be a note signed by parents/carers indicating that they have played one of the games or read at least 3 times at home. If however, parents or children are keen to do more, the homework grids detail a range of activities worth a range of points in the areas of reading, writing, maths, science and the arts. Beyond the two pieces of homework a week minimum, it is up to families how many of these additional activities they wish to pursue.
If any families are having difficulty making time for homework, would like help in engaging children in homework or have any questions or comments about homework, please come to Brew Club in the Green Room any morning from 8.30 and we will be happy to chat and help. We also run an after-school Homework Club every Monday. Sign-up if you would like your child to be involved.