From day one, the biggest challenge facing students in their school and home life, causing stress and pressure of time, has been homework.
According to a research conducted by Stanford Graduate School of education, in which about 4300 students participated; over 56% have claimed homework to be the major source or cause of their stress; others reported sleep deprivation, anxiety, weight loss, fatigue, and many problems.
After considering a series of debates and reviews, ACS Egham decided to drop for students age four to eleven; Traditional homework.
There have been debates and opinions over the advantages of homework for a very long time now, of which different countries come up with different approaches. On the verge of discovering a better or the best method for assignment helps students and parents attain optimal well-being. This article has pointed out that for homework to be very effective; it has to be personalized (for each student).
Below are five simple ways and approaches to get the most out of homework:
Traditional homework
Traditional homework (busy work) does enhance individual students’ learning experience and also helps them understand better. Homework assumes that students are the same maturity, concentration, and ability to assimilate which is not supposed to be considering that in life generally, capabilities vary from one person to another. This type of homework subjects students to stress when they feel that they have an impossible task ahead of them, and they have to solve it all alone.
Because students spend up to seven hours or even more at school, their only free time after school, which is supposed to be spent with their families or other extracurricular activities to help develop their minds, body, and soul, is always consumed by traditional works. Students, especially younger ones, should be encouraged to spend their after-school time developing their creativity.
After deep reflection on these issues, we conclude that busy work gets replaced with a personal guide approach to learning and class works. Both students and parents can share or solve, making the work meaningful, easy, manageable, time-saving, and worthwhile.
Personalized approaches
Teachers share the topics to be treated or the upcoming term’s curriculum with parents and advise these topics are studied or learned at home; this can be done anywhere in the house, say during trips, at the dining table. Teachers can also include extracurricular activities such as a visit to the museum, crafts, or art exhibitions.
Compulsory reading time (timetable), arithmetic, literacy skills can also be learned at home. Children practice with their parents’ help every day, like calculating a budget list, measuring furniture and lots parents equally encourage the students daily as much as possible.
All these help students always apply their class learning in every context they see. In a multicultural class, native languages other than English can help widen their vocabularies.
Alternative education systems
Generally, students are given no homework in Finland; they don’t even start school until the age of seven and spend a short time at school every day. Finland is known to be one of the best and leading countries when it comes to education in the world; this is because the key concept in the Finnish school education system depends on trust; the parents believing the teacher would deliver their children a good education, as regards the homework opinion, if quality education is made available at school, then there is no need to spend more time in the evening to take care of home works.
Developing skills for the future
Students aged nine to eleven years get prepared for I-inquiry projects to research different topics for 3-4 weeks, which helps them broaden their knowledge and enhance their communication skills and public speaking through final presentation.