St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

This Wednesday, we kick off a series on helping your child with homework. Our series is going to give you a number of simple tips to help you to help your child with all aspects of their homework. We want to know what works for you and what you’d like advice on. We’d love to hear from you! To get us started, we brainstormed our best homework tips at a staff meeting earlier this week. We hope this post will be edited regularly, as we get more and more tips and advice!

Here’s the structure of our mini-series:

• Week 1 (today): General tips and links
• Week 2: How to help your child with his/her learning homework
• Week 3: How to help your child with reading homework
• Week 4: How to help your older child with study skills

Today, we’re covering general tips for helping with homework!

• Agree on a set time for homework with your child. Among other tips, Schooldays.ie suggest that you allow your child some element of choice, i.e. that your child may start and finish when they want to, providing it falls between 3pm and 5pm.
• Have a snack before they start – it gives a little break in between school and homework, and lessens the chance of low blood sugars causing rows!
• Encourage your child to sit at a table – it makes their handwriting much neater.
• There’s a familiar scene in every classroom at least once or twice a week, where a child goes into a panic because they know that they did their homework, but can’t find it. Get your child to check that they have all the books and copies they need for the next day in their bag.
• On the topic of organisational skills, encourage your child to label, date and number their work. It’s much easier to identify their homework and it looks far neater. We also ask our students to rule their page in red pen.
• Switch off the tv and game consoles while your child is doing their homework. We’re not suggesting that everyone should tiptoe or whisper – but distracting lights and noise will only delay getting homework finished!
• One important tip that came up via Schooldays.ie is one that we would also recommend. Allow your child to make mistakes. Help them to correct mistakes, rather than constantly correcting their mistakes. Editing work and correcting mistakes, particularly in Maths, are important skills.
• Parents often tell us that their children are taking way too long to do their homework. We recommend using an oven timer or an alarm on your phone to keep your child on task. Allowing ten minutes for a task will often focus the child and can help to eliminate the long periods of time staring out the window.
• If your child is working consistently but is still genuinely struggling with homework, talk to your child’s teacher. Note in his/her homework journal the amount of time being spent on homework for a couple of days and discuss what you’ve noticed with the teacher in person.

Over to you! What do you recommend to help with homework?