To Dylan, going to museums, reenactments, etc. are vacations. That's what he loves and so do we. If we ever to go away for a vacation, it would be to visit the Civil War battlefields.
Yes, I think it's a slightly different philosophy, at least when it comes to homework. At our elementary school, homework isn't graded, and parents are expected (and encouraged) to help kids with their homework. Most of the projects are "family projects." We don't get requested in 3d grade not to help the kids with their homework unless they ask for it.
What I've done with my kids isn't that different from what you do, however, except that I do check homework every day (for elementary school), which I think you said you don't do.
Yeah, that makes sense. We have a language issue too, but it's different from the one you face. We have a lot of ELL kids in our school. One of the problems is that the parents of these kids usually don't speak English, so they can't really help with homework, since schoolwork is all in English.
That was me when ds was in K-3. By the time he hit 4th grade, my Swedish was good enough to communicate with the teacher and at least understand most of his homework. I still couldn't help much with Swedish or math homework, though. Swedish was impossible for obvious reasons, but math was a surprise for me. Different countries have different conventions and approaches for solving things (for example, the way the solution is shown for long division is completely different). The kids in effect had to learn how to do math in Swedish and English.
on the flip side, knowing that this woman's dd probably had great difficulty retaining the history information helps to understand exactly why she worked with her dd all week on it.
It sounds like she just assumed that others were having trouble with it too.
FWIW -- my dd and ds almost never had to study for a spelling test. Generally, they're natural born spellers. As for dsd, she's a whole other ball of wax. She has to review them (above and beyond the actual spelling workbook pages for homework) each day. If she had them wrong, she wrote them 5-10x each while saying the letters out loud. Even doing all that, she could get a 100% on the test and then mispell the word the following week when using it in a paragraph.
Actually, I don't think so. She approached all home work with this kind of determination. The kid was perfectly fine, but even in first grade, only straight A+s would do for her mother. We had a couple of parents like this in the class. The mother was interested in upward social mobility and saw one step as getting her kid into a prestigious private HS (which she accomplished eventually).
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To Dylan, going to museums, reenactments, etc. are vacations. That's what he loves and so do we. If we ever to go away for a vacation, it would be to visit the Civil War battlefields.
Chris
The truth may be out there but lies are in your head. Terry Pratchett
Exactly. Life is an education. School is just one means among many to achieve that.
Chris
The truth may be out there but lies are in your head. Terry Pratchett
Yes, I think it's a slightly different philosophy, at least when it comes to homework. At our elementary school, homework isn't graded, and parents are expected (and encouraged) to help kids with their homework. Most of the projects are "family projects." We don't get requested in 3d grade not to help the kids with their homework unless they ask for it.
What I've done with my kids isn't that different from what you do, however, except that I do check homework every day (for elementary school), which I think you said you don't do.
on the flip side, knowing that this woman's dd probably had great difficulty retaining the history information helps to understand exactly why she worked with her dd all week on it.
It sounds like she just assumed that others were having trouble with it too.
FWIW -- my dd and ds almost never had to study for a spelling test. Generally, they're natural born spellers. As for dsd, she's a whole other ball of wax. She has to review them (above and beyond the actual spelling workbook pages for homework) each day. If she had them wrong, she wrote them 5-10x each while saying the letters out loud. Even doing all that, she could get a 100% on the test and then mispell the word the following week when using it in a paragraph.
eileen
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