Parentella

I am not a fan of my kids doing homework, but I have come to realize the need to clarify that position. I don’t enjoy afternoons and evenings filled with so much homework it leaves our family no time for fun together, or being put in the position of having to enforce homework drudgery on my kids.

But if we’re talking about a diorama or a science project? Baby, I’m all over it.

Over our three week Winter Break here in the Los Angeles Unified School District, my kids each had really fun projects to do that the whole family could get excited about (possibly me the most).

My Middle-Schooler had a science project that involved taking a hike down to a beach we’d never been to in order to see the tide pools and geological formations.

The whole family went along to San Pedro and we all learned about marine terraces, soil deposition, wave erosion, and that there are many more organisms living in tide pools there than we thought possible (I will confess right now to having been a closet Earth Science geek for much of my life. So fun!).

My son had to take notes and photos of what he saw and put it all together in a Microsoft Word document. I feel confident that he will remember those concepts the rest of his life since they are embedded in the fun family experience we had.

My Second-Grader needed to read a Magic Tree House book and make a diorama of his favorite part. He chose the one where the protagonists go back in time to the Ice Age and encounter a Woolly Mammoth and a Saber Tooth cat. He decided which part of the story he wanted to illustrate, and enlisted our help assembling all the materials.

Again, the whole family participated, since we all like to do crafts. My son got to be in charge, kind of a fun thing for the youngest in the family, letting us know what things he needed us to do to get it right. I helped transform a plastic elephant into its wooly ancestor under the direction of my 7-year-old. It took several days since there was a lot of glue drying time involved, and he was really excited when it was done. And so was I-–it looked great (in my somewhat-biased opinion)!

These homework assignments were fun for the whole family and were a great way for us parents to participate in our kids’ schoolwork. They also got our kids up out of their chairs and doing some hands-on learning, which I think makes it seem more like fun than homework.

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Sarah Auerswald is the blogger behind MarVistaMom and Sarah’s Blog.

Related posts:

1. Winter Break Is A Welcome Break
2. A Must Have Item For Back-to-School
3. What Jaime Escalante (and those like him) Taught Us All
4. How to Bridge the Summer Learning Gap
5. Have Fun & Reinforce Mathematics Learning

Tags: dioramas, Homework, science projects

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 12:01 am and is filed under Learning Activites, Parent Perspectives, Sarah Auerswald. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.