World-renowned clinical child psychologist and best-selling author, Dr. Ross Greene said that No kid should be getting three or four hours of homework a night. There's no breathing time, there's no family time, there are just extracurriculars and homework, and then, going to bed.
Holiday homework is intended to make students independent and enhance their skills and capabilities. Holiday homework helps to keep students on track and keep their brains ticking. While holiday homework ensures that the students don’t lose touch with what they have learned, it is important to give them enough space to enjoy the holidays. To ensure the same, you have got to analyze the feasibility of the work that you are assigning them and the gravity. Without further ado, let us take a look at five important things that teachers should keep in mind while assigning holiday homework to their students.
How to Design Holiday Homework- 5 Tips
1. Understand Your Students
The first and most important thing that you have to take into consideration is your students. Understanding your students is the first step. The holiday homework should be on par with their capacity and ability. Of course, there’s no harm in making it challenging and pushing their limits a little but make sure to strike a balance. There’s no point in talking Latin when your students don’t understand the language. Assigning holiday homework that is way beyond their intellectual capacity or way below their capacity will not do them any good and that’s why you have got to understand them. There might be students who like challenges and to address this population of the classroom you can create an additional section on the assignment sheet and make it optional. Make sure not to discriminate against your students based on this optional section.
2. Define the Objectives
What do you want your students to accomplish through the holiday homework? For example, if the holiday homework is to write a poem, what are the learning objectives? That the students should understand the structure of the poetry, poetic figures, and poetic justice? The teacher must have a clear sense of the same. In addition to this, the teacher must be able to articulate the learning objectives to the students so that they can do complete justice to the holiday homework.
3. Make it Interesting
More often than not, students find holiday homework boring and drab. While designing the holiday work, teachers should put in the effort to make it challenging and interesting. If it is a simple coloring exercise, you can give tiny riddles about the colors and they have to figure out what the color is. Similarly, you can make all the work interesting so that the students would ill feel like doing it.
4. Keep Parent Involvement to a Minimum
Let’s face it. More than 90% of homework is done by parents. If you ask second graders to make the model of the Taj Mahal, of course, the parents would do it. This is why we mentioned in the first step that the teachers should understand the students and give them a mountain that they can climb. As mentioned, articulate the learning objectives and while interacting with the parents, let them know that you are expecting minimum involvement from them. If you are assigning holiday homework to high school students and students in higher grades, this step can be skipped.
5. Clarify the Criteria
On what basis are you going to grade the holiday homework? The criteria and the grading pattern must be transparent so that the students have a clear understanding of what to focus on. When you are designing the holiday homework, create a proper framework that you want to stick by and share with your students.
Holiday homework is an amazing way to let your students stand close to what they have learned. As mentioned, it is important to strike a balance and help your students have a good holiday while learning new skills and polishing the existing ones. It is up to the teacher to make homework dull or interesting and the tips that we have discussed are sure to make it the latter. Go ahead and create homework that the students would enjoy doing!
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