St. Peter's Primary Bray Blog

This week, we continue our series on helping with homework by focusing on learning homework. Learning homework can be the hardest part of homework to do well because it’s not as measurable as written homework. A child can achieve the same amount of work in 3 minutes of focused learning homework one day, as he would on another day of an hour’s distracted learning!

Learning homework will usually take the form of four different types of learning:

• Spellings
• Tables
• Gaeilge
• General learning – maths vocab, dates in history etc.

Our tips include:

• Test your child by mixing up the vocab or maths facts. Can your child spell or say the answers when they’re out of order?
• Test your child by asking him or her to write it down. Can they say it and write it?
• Encourage your child to do their learning homework every day. The repetition of learning everyday will help your child to hold on to the knowledge. Five or ten minutes every day is much better than three hours in one night!
• On the same point, practise learning homework in the car, in the supermarket, waiting for the bus – tables are especially important to learn in this way. They really need to be second nature!
• We found this fantastic post from MerryBeau in St Brigid’s in Greystones, about the importance of learning tables. She has a number of excellent links and ways to learn tables.
• One way to learn vocabulary and spellings is to use ‘Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check’. Your child writes the tricky word, looks at it carefully and says it. Your child then covers the word and attempts to write it. They then check the spelling of the word. If the word is correct, the child can move on. If it’s incorrect, repeat the process. You can see an example of how it works on this website.

Most of all, experiment and find what works for you and your family. As we mentioned before, we intend this post to be a work in progress and we’d love to add what works for you! Let us know in the comments!