Academic Life: Homework
Homework
Our classrooms are busy places that resonate with a productive hum of activity at just about every moment of the day. We fully expect your children to come home to you both exhausted and exhilarated. The Trinity faculty values extending learning into the home for the purposes of reinforcement, connection and personal responsibility, but we also firmly believe that children need time for unstructured and structured play!
Based on these beliefs, parents and students of TES can expect the following:
Kindergarten through Second-Grade
- Students are expected to read daily (Sunday through Saturday) for 15 – 20 minutes (15 for most kindergartners). This reading is primarily done independently and by reading to or with an adult.
- Students are expected to be read to daily. To accomplish our literacy goals, students must hear between four and six books (or chapters of longer books) read aloud each day. It is our greatest hope and expectation that every Trinity family will be a reading family, coming together each night around a chapter book, poetry collection or story.
- Students will occasionally have a task to accompany their reading. This may be an entry in their readers’ notebooks, a curiosity question to pursue with an adult or some word work, usually following-up on what was introduced in Readers’ Workshop that day.
- Students may be asked to complete a review or extension activity related to mathematics instruction or a science/social studies pursuit.
Third- through Fifth-Grades
- Students are expected to read daily (Sunday through Saturday) for 20-40 minutes (20 minutes for most third-graders). This reading is done independently and in a sustained and concentrated manner.
- Students are expected to be read to daily. To accomplish our literacy goals, older students must have many daily occasions to hear the sounds of language unfold before them. This shared reading time can (and we hope often will) be in the form of a chapter book read aloud and can also include reading and discussing something from the newspaper or another publication.
- Students are expected to spend between 15 and 40 minutes (15 for most third-graders) on independent work. This work may relate to their individual reading, to math concepts introduced in the classroom or to a cumulative project.
- Students and parents can expect that teachers will hold students accountable to a regular pattern of homework completion. While we all accept the occasional missed assignment or mislaid paper, establishing positive practices for homework is essential during these intermediate grade years. When completing assignments at home, we urge students (and parents) to use common sense. If an assignment is taking an unreasonable amount of time or effort, we would not urge a student to persist in burning the “midnight oil.” Encourage your child to let his/her teacher know when a problem arises.
Sixth- through Eighth-Grades
- Middle School students have the potential for as many as seven homework sources! This requires a well-coordinated effort on everyone’s part! To assist with this endeavor, each middle-schooler works from an Agenda, which will serve as a primary means of communication between home and school. In addition to containing a by-the-week homework calendar, it contains a monthly organizer for posting all tests, quizzes and project due dates. The question to ask when your middle school learner says, “I don’t have any homework,” is, “Let’s take a look at your Agenda to make sure of that!”
- Middle School students (and their parents) can expect an increase in the amount of and requirements for homework. Timely and thorough preparation of assignments is important for many reasons, including staying current, demonstrating a keen level of understanding and strengthening task endurance. So too, we feel, is enabling time for pursuits outside of school and academic arenas. The challenge is striking the right balance for each student. We urge parents and students to take stock of how and where time is spent outside of school, together considering your learner’s schedule and priorities. Even middle-schoolers need time for unstructured play! We welcome parent and student feedback about the workload and its impact on life at home.
- Students are expected to read daily (between 25-50 minutes) in assigned or unassigned works. Students should be prepared to offer response and reflection through a variety of modes (journal, discussion, essay, etc.).
- Students and parents can expect that daily homework time will average (depending on the student, daily schedule and time within the semester) between 60-120 minutes.
