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5 Places To Find Homework Help

September 17, 2023.

Parents play a crucial role in their children’s education, and helping with homework is an essential part of that involvement. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a significant 83 percent of parents of Black students reported that they checked to ensure their children’s homework was completed. Additionally, more than 40 percent of parents of Black students reported providing homework help three or more times a week, as noted by the National Science Foundation.

In today’s digital age, parents have access to a wealth of free resources to assist their children with homework, and one of the most versatile tools at their disposal is YouTube . This article explores five free homework-help sources for parents.

black parents helping with homework

Homework Help Resources for School-Age Children

 pbs kids and educational websites: engaging and fun learning.

PBS Kids  and various other educational websites offer interactive and enjoyable content explicitly tailored for school-age children. These platforms cover multiple subjects and provide educational games, videos, and activities that make learning a fun and engaging experience.

Parents can explore these websites together with their children, incorporating them into their daily routines to create a supportive and enjoyable learning environment at home.

 Starfall: Phonics and Literacy Learning 

Starfall  is a free public service that focuses on phonics and literacy learning. It provides interactive games, songs, and activities designed to improve reading and writing skills in young learners.

Parents can use Starfall to support their child’s literacy development, particularly for reading assignments and language arts homework.

 ABCmouse: Comprehensive Early Learning Program

ABCmouse offers a comprehensive early learning program for children aged 2-8. It covers subjects like reading, math, science, and more through interactive lessons, games, and activities.

Parents of younger school-age children can use ABCmouse to reinforce foundational skills and introduce them to various academic topics.

 Coolmath4Kids: Making Math Fun

Coolmath4Kids  is an engaging website that turns math into an enjoyable experience. It offers math games, puzzles, and lessons designed to make mathematics fun and accessible for school-age children.

Parents can use Coolmath4Kids to help their children build strong math skills while having a great time.

 Reading Rockets: Literacy Support

Reading Rockets  is a valuable resource for parents who want to support their child’s reading and literacy development. It offers strategies, activities, and booklists to improve reading comprehension and fluency.

Parents can access free resources and tips to assist their children with reading assignments and language arts homework.

“…83 percent of parents of Black students reported that they checked to ensure their children’s homework was completed.”

— National Center for Education Statistics

Homework Help Resources for High School Students

As students progress into high school, their homework assignments become more complex, requiring additional support. Here are five free resources specifically suited for high school students and their parents to navigate challenging assignments successfully.

 YouTube: Comprehensive Educational Content

YouTube remains a versatile and valuable resource for high school students. It offers a vast library of educational channels and videos covering mathematics, science, history, and literature. For high school math problems, YouTube provides an array of instructional videos that break down complex concepts.

Parents can guide their high school students to reputable channels like Khan Academy  for comprehensive tutorials. Khan Academy’s videos align with high school curriculum standards and provide detailed explanations.

 Coursera for Campus: University-Level Learning

Coursera: High school students often encounter advanced or specialized topics in their coursework. Coursera for Campus offers free courses from universities and colleges, allowing students to explore subjects beyond their current curriculum.

Parents can encourage their high school students to enroll in courses that align with their interests or areas where they require additional support. These courses, often taught by professors from prestigious institutions, offer in-depth knowledge and insights.

 MIT OpenCourseWare: Access to University-Level Content

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) provides nearly all of its course content online for free through MIT OpenCourseWare. This resource is particularly beneficial for high school students seeking advanced or specialized science, engineering, and technology knowledge.

High school students and their parents can access lecture notes, assignments, and exams, enabling them to dive deep into challenging topics and gain a competitive edge in their studies.

“…more than 40 percent of parents of Black students reported providing homework help three or more times a week.”

— National Science Foundation

 SparkNotes: Study Guides and Literature Resources

SparkNotes  offers study guides, literary analyses, and resources for classic and contemporary literature commonly studied in high school. It provides valuable insights and summaries to support students with literature assignments and reading projects.

Parents can recommend SparkNotes as a supplementary resource to help their high school students excel in English and literature courses.

 Wolfram Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine

Wolfram Alpha  is a powerful computational knowledge engine that can assist high school students in mathematics, science, and more. It provides step-by-step solutions to math problems, generates plots and graphs, and explains various concepts.

Parents can encourage their high school students to use Wolfram Alpha to solve complex math problems and gain a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts.

Parents can access various age-appropriate resources to assist their children with homework, whether they are school-age or high school students. By utilizing these tools and resources, parents can actively engage in their children’s education, ensuring their academic success and nurturing a lifelong love for learning. The statistics on our involvement in our children’s education emphasize the importance of parental support in homework completion and learning success.

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April 12, 2018

Sociologist upends notions about parental help with homework

by Loretta Waldman, University of Connecticut

homework

UConn researcher Angran Li, a doctoral student in sociology, has found that one size does not fit all students when it comes to parents helping with homework, and that parental involvement in homework can be particularly beneficial among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students.

His findings, along with research collaborator Daniel Hamlin, a former doctoral student at the University of Toronto who is now at Harvard University, upend the conclusion of a 2014 study that found parents who help their children with homework hurt their performance at school.

Li will present their research at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) this week in New York City.

The earlier study out of the University of Texas-Austin and Duke University, was the largest ever at the time on how parental involvement affects student achievement . It was the subject of several stories and opinion pieces in news outlets in the U.S. and Canada, including The Atlantic and New York Times .

Li and Hamlin challenged those findings by adding another, more rigorous layer of analysis that showed the impact of parental involvement in homework is more nuanced than the earlier study suggests and can actually be beneficial among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students.

The researchers sensed that parental involvement alone did not drive poor performance. And their study concluded scientifically that their hunch was correct.

"We knew that with scientific studies, correlation is not causation," Li explains. "We looked at it from a different angle, employing different quantitative methods, trying to disentangle why these things happen."

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Li and Hamlin conducted their research on a nationwide sample of 11,471 students. They used parental help with homework in the first grade as a predictor of student achievement in the third grade, applying controls for student background and prior achievement. Variables such as the student's gender, race, ethnicity, the age of their parents, and the number of siblings were also considered, as were the socioeconomic status of parents in relation to education, income, and occupation. Parental expectations, beliefs, communication, school involvement, and educational activities in the home were also factored into their statistical analysis. They even looked at the number of days parents offered help to a student each week.

What they found was that socio-economically advantaged parents and those with a greater number of children in the family had a lower propensity to provide daily help with homework. Higher math and reading scores also were shown to significantly decrease a parent's propensity to help with homework – a pattern that suggests that lower relative performance by students may prompt parents to provide daily homework assistance.

"The poor performance kids, they required more help," Li notes. "But when they were really helped, they actually improved."

The debate about parental involvement has intensified in the wake of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, he says. These educational improvement initiatives of the second Bush and Obama administration respectively, both call for increased levels of parental involvement.

"There is all this debate over parenting and how American parents spend too much energy on their children's education. That's true. That works for well-off families," says Li. "But we're now seeing that for disadvantaged families, we still need to encourage them to be involved, because it can be really beneficial to their kids.

"We talked about those articles that encouraged parents not to help their kids," Li continues. "We thought they were making the wrong suggestion, but we really wanted to provide some scientific evidence to prove they are wrong. So we started this project and found something really interesting – they were dead wrong."

The takeaway for educators, policymakers, and parents, Li says, is that one size does not fit all students when it comes to parents helping with homework.

When kids are not doing well at school and parents are helping with homework, it may look like they are having a negative effect on their children when parental involvement is evaluated in relation to performance alone.

Li's research suggests the opposite may be true, and that low student performance may actually explain parental involvement – a conclusion that runs counter to assumptions about parents of economically disadvantaged, lower-performing students being less engaged with their children's education than those of more economically advantaged, higher-performing white students.

"When kids are not doing well at school, parents are more likely to help with their homework. That's why we observe this negative correlation between parent help with homework and student achievement," says Li. By factoring in other variables, he and Hamlin found parental homework help can be beneficial for students in disadvantaged families, especially when compared to advantaged families.

"So we are encouraging especially parents from disadvantaged families to help with homework , to get actively involved at school, and stay actively involved in your child's education to compensate for this disadvantage," says Li.

Provided by University of Connecticut

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black parents helping with homework

November 28, 2018

How Black Parents Can Work With Tutors Effectively for Their Children

Oftentimes, parents don’t know what tutoring should really look like or know what classes their kids need to take, let alone how to help with homework. I often hear parents discuss with friends that the “new math” is killing them and their kids don’t understand. Students spend all night working on homework that doesn’t get completed or turned in at all. This can lead to stress, drain confidence, and add to the current achievement gap we have as African American people. So, how do we address this problem for black parents? By establishing an interactive relationship with tutors.

Three Tips on Working with Tutors for Black Students 

1. Relationship Building

Relationships control the success of not only personal and business success, but also academic success. If the parents or the student doesn’t like the tutor, the tutor has lost from the very beginning. Students will be very real and transparent when it comes to who they like and want to work with. They can also tell if you are coming to tutor them for the money or if you genuinely care about success and growth. Parents should be watching to see if the vibe is well with the tutor and their child. This sets the tone. Building a close relationship ensures trust that the tutor will get the job done in the best interest of the child and the parent. Oftentimes, it’s best to have your student tutored by someone who looks like them, talks like them, and can relate to them.

2. Teacher Interaction

Once the tutor is selected and a relationship is built, make sure to engage with the child’s teachers and bring in the tutor to meet with them. Teacher interaction makes all the difference in working effectively with a tutor.

3. A Good Tutor is Engaged with the Child 

Tutoring for the black student means being present for them. If students have questions on problems outside of tutoring, a good tutor should be open to assisting them. If students need to call them with a concern about bullying or something personal, they are open and present as a listening ear.

Tutoring for the black student is very high touch in process and requires a lot of care, education, patience, and love for students. Black tutors can often help black students due to their own life experiences.

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The Rise of Black Homeschooling

By Casey Parks

Victoria Bradley leaning against a tree wearing a Class of '21 sweatshirt

When Victoria Bradley was in fifth grade, she started asking her mother, Bernita, to homeschool her. Bernita wasn’t sure where the idea came from—they never saw homeschooling on TV. But something always seemed to be going wrong at school for Victoria. In second grade, a teacher lost track of her during parent pickup, and she wandered off school grounds. Bernita went to see the principal, intent on getting the teacher fired. The principal asked if she would consider taking an AmeriCorps position at the school. Bernita cut back her hours at the hair salon she owned and started doing community outreach, assisting teachers and hosting parent meetings.

In 2011, Bernita moved her family—which also included her older son, Carlos—to Detroit ’s East English neighborhood, where she bought a three-story, yellow brick house for twelve thousand dollars. Victoria, then in fourth grade, transferred to Brenda Scott Academy, where two girls began bullying her. One wrote “I’m fat” in black pen on the back of Victoria’s shirt. On another occasion, one of the girls spit at Victoria. She screamed at them, and was suspended. (That year, administrators suspended three hundred and forty Black students, or forty-two per cent of the school’s Black population, and another sixteen Black girls were arrested there.)

Victoria moved to a top-rated charter school, where she lasted only a few months—she said that an administrator picked on certain Black students. By fifth grade, Victoria had attended five schools, and she was tired of being the new kid. She brought up homeschooling when she was reprimanded for having blue braids, and again in eighth grade, after some boys dared each other to try picking her up as she sat at her desk. Homeschooling, she said, would allow her to learn at her own pace, without anyone making fun of her. Bernita was sympathetic, but she told Victoria that she couldn’t teach her. She was a single mom, and she’d never completed her college degree.

For high school, Victoria enrolled in a majority-white charter school. Before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered Detroit’s school system, which serves about fifty-three thousand children, she had failed chemistry and barely passed algebra. Soon after school went remote, in March, 2020, Victoria asked Bernita if she could drop out and take a job doing nails.

During the first months of lockdown, Bernita, who works as an educational consultant, spent hours each day talking to other parents of students in the Detroit system on Zoom and Facebook. One mother told her that she had shut herself in the bathroom to cry after overhearing teachers berate her children on Microsoft Teams. Others told Bernita they’d only just discovered that their kids had been performing below grade level. (Before the pandemic, six per cent of Detroit’s fourth graders met proficiency benchmarks in math, and seven per cent in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)

Early one evening last July, before Victoria’s senior year, Bernita and Victoria pulled into their driveway and found that a container of dish soap they’d bought at Sam’s Club had spilled in the trunk. While Bernita bailed out the soap using a three-ring binder and some old rags, Victoria looked down the cracked driveway and pointed at a swarm of fireflies. “What makes them glow?” she asked.

Bernita watched Victoria chase the fireflies around the yard for a few minutes. This, she thought, was what a Black kid’s life should feel like—happy and unencumbered. She told Victoria to find a Mason jar. They ran through the grass until Victoria had trapped a single glowing insect. Afterward, they sat on their stoop, researching the specimen on Victoria’s phone. They learned that the bugs belong to the family Lampyridae, and that a bioluminescent enzyme makes them glow.

As Victoria scrolled, Bernita laughed. “You do know this is homeschooling, right?” she asked.

Victoria looked up from her phone. The fireflies lit up around them. “Really?” she asked.

“Yep,” Bernita said. “This is homeschooling. This is science. We about to do this for real.”

Black families have only recently turned to homeschooling in significant numbers. The Census Bureau found that, by October, 2020, the nationwide proportion of homeschoolers—parents who had withdrawn their children from public or private schools and taken full control of their education—had risen to more than eleven per cent, from five per cent at the start of the pandemic . For Black families, the growth has been sharper. Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent.

Few researchers have studied Black homeschoolers, but in 2009 Cheryl Fields-Smith, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Mary Frances Early College of Education, published a study of two dozen such families in and around Atlanta. Some parents were middle class or wealthy, and wanted more challenging curricula for their children. Others hadn’t attended college and earned less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; one family lived in a housing project.

Most of the parents told Fields-Smith that the decision had been wrenching. Winning access to public education was one of the central victories of the civil-rights movement. Several parents had relatives who saw homeschooling as “a slap in the face” to the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Others worried about harming their neighbors’ children, because public schools rely on per-pupil funding from state governments. (In 2020, around seventy per cent of Detroit public-school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state.)

Still, the parents said that they felt as if they’d had no choice, with eighty per cent citing pervasive racism and inequities. Even in the wealthy families, parents said that their kids were frequently punished or seen as troublemakers. In some cases, students had been inappropriately recommended for special-education classes or medication; other students were bullied. In a study conducted in 2010 by professors from Temple University and Montgomery County Community College, homeschooling parents said that they thought Black Americans had been tricked into fighting for integration. “Somebody put in our heads that being around your own kind was the worst thing in the world. How you need to be in better neighborhoods, in neighborhoods where people don’t want you, in schools where people don’t want to teach you,” a mother in Virginia, who was homeschooling two children, said.

Bernita and Victoria first encountered a Black homeschooling family in 2015, when Victoria was in seventh grade and attending an after-school music class with a girl named Zwena Gray. Zwena’s mother, Kija, had worked for many years as a substitute teacher in the University Prep School charter system. Most schools, in her view, prioritize whiteness—the kids are taught about white politicians and white inventors, and teachers and Black children are pushed toward compliance rather than creativity. Kija’s son, Kafele, was frequently bullied. When he was in eighth grade, administrators at the charter school he was attending threatened to suspend him for not tucking in his shirt. Kija decided to homeschool him, and later Zwena, who was then in fifth grade. The children enrolled in online courses; Kija spent less time substitute teaching, and her husband, who works for the Detroit Health Department, also helped. Kafele returned to the charter school in eleventh grade, but Zwena never went back to school.

When we talked in her dining room, Kija was baking cinnamon pound cakes to sell. As she described her journey from charter-school teacher to homeschool enthusiast, she drew a Biblical parallel: “Satan was the closest thing to God, and he saw this shit for what it was, and he was, like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ He started to question things, and that’s what made him cast out, because he didn’t have blind faith—he had critical faith.”

Bernita was astonished by what Kija had achieved with her children. Zwena had built robots, written code for Web sites, and designed her own clothes. But Kija had a bachelor’s degree and a background in teaching. Bernita still couldn’t see homeschooling as an option for Victoria.

In early 2020, an online acquaintance of Bernita’s, Keri Rodrigues, a former labor organizer in Massachusetts and the president of a new organization called the National Parents Union, persuaded her to begin hosting a weekly forum for parents on Facebook Live. At the beginning of June, Bernita invited Kija on as a guest. It was a week after the police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in Minneapolis; thousands of people were protesting in downtown Detroit. The parents who spoke in the Facebook forum connected the uprising for racial justice with their experiences in the educational system. One mother said that she had tried many public and private schools; at all of them, the front office was filled with Black boys awaiting discipline.

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Tesha Jordan, a single mother who works for Head Start, said that she’d been urged to transfer her son out of his middle school after his behavioral issues had scared a teacher. Jordan’s son has a learning disability, and she worried that if she homeschooled him he would lose out—the state gave his middle school money for a social worker to help him with his homework twice a week. “I’m not a teacher,” Jordan said. “I’m just a mother.”

Kija, watching from her living room, unmuted herself. “When I heard you say they had a behavioral problem—or you were told that—the thing that came to mind for me was, all Black people have a behavioral problem. It’s called trauma,” she said. “And when you said, ‘I’m not a teacher, I’m a mother’—those two things are synonymous.”

The modern homeschooling movement in America was ignited in the nineteen-sixties, after Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 prohibited school prayer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial segregation in public institutions. Although homeschooling attracted some left-leaning hippies during the sixties and seventies, by the nineteen-eighties its most vocal and influential supporters were white Christian conservatives, according to Heath Brown, an associate professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of the recent book “Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State.”

Most of the earliest homeschooling textbooks were written from a Christian perspective, and some were racist. Bob Jones University, the private South Carolina college that refused to admit Black students until 1971, began issuing homeschooling textbooks through its press later that decade. “United States History for Christian Schools,” first published in 1991, stated that most slaveholders treated enslaved people well, and that slavery “is an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin. The sin in this case was greed—greed on the part of African tribal leaders.”

Arlin and Rebekah Horton, who met at Bob Jones University, went on to found what became Abeka, a Christian publisher that produces some of the country’s most popular homeschooling materials. Abeka’s “America: Land I Love,” for eighth graders, first published in 1996 and now in its third edition, argued that slavery allowed Black people to find Jesus. Abeka’s eleventh-grade textbook “United States History: Heritage of Freedom,” first published in 1983 and now in its fourth edition, claimed that the Ku Klux Klan only occasionally resorted to violence. A 2018 investigation by the Orlando Sentinel found that Abeka was still producing textbooks stating that “the slave who knew Christ had more freedom than a free person who did not know the Savior.”

Early supporters of homeschooling wanted as little government intervention as possible and advocated against legislative proposals that would have sent money their way, Brown told me. “It was a bargain they were unwilling to take,” he said. “In exchange for small amounts of funding, they would be subject to the things they fear most, which was having to adhere to a set of standardized educational schooling practices, on everything from teacher certification to testing to curricular choice.”

In 1983, a group of white evangelical lawyers formed the Home School Legal Defense Association, to represent homeschooling parents who’d been arrested for not sending their children to school. When officers arrested two farmers in Michigan who’d been educating their children at home without a license, the H.S.L.D.A. spent nearly a decade fighting their case. In 1993, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that homeschooling parents in Michigan did not need to be certified. (Michael Farris, the founding president of the H.S.L.D.A. and its board chairman, is now head of the conservative Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, which in recent years has pushed for a series of anti-gay and anti-trans bills.)

The H.S.L.D.A. offers grants directly to coöperatives formed by homeschooling parents; after the number of homeschoolers spiked during the pandemic, it doubled its grant dollars for this year, to $1.3 million. As the number of Black and Latino homeschooling families has grown, the group has attempted to diversify its membership and staff. All but one of its lawyers are white, but it recently hired several Black and Latino consultants. LaNissir James, who has seven children, ranging in age from five to twenty-three, and who is based in Maryland but “roadschools” across multiple states in her R.V., started working as a high-school educational consultant for the H.S.L.D.A. in 2019. Families “first need to understand the law,” she said, because homeschooling regulations vary widely from state to state. Then James interviews parents to assess their children’s academic needs. “Are Mom and Dad working? Is Mom home? Do they want to be online? You find their strengths and weaknesses so that you can find a curriculum that matches that family.”

For Black families like James’s, the ability to improvise a curriculum is a major reason to try homeschooling. “We are not seeing ourselves in textbooks,” she said. “I love traditional American history, but I like to take my kids to the Museum of African American History and Culture and say, O.K., here’s what was going on with Black people in 1800.” There are now hundreds of curricula to choose from, available on free or inexpensive Web sites such as Khan Academy and Outschool. Last year, one of the most popular offerings on Outschool was a course called Black History from a Decolonized Perspective, taught by Iman Alleyne, a former schoolteacher in Fort Lauderdale, who turned to homeschooling after her elementary-age son told her that school made him want to die.

James said that some of her Black clients need to know that homeschooling is something other Black families do. “That’s a normal feeling,” she told me. “And the answer is yes. There is joy for Black homeschoolers who find out about other Black homeschoolers.”

In August, 2020, Bernita applied for and won a twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant from Keri Rodrigues’s group, the National Parents Union, to fund a homeschooling collective called Engaged Detroit. She hired Kija and two other Black homeschooling mothers, at thirty-five dollars an hour, to coach a group of twelve parents, and used the remaining money to buy software, laptops, and other supplies.

In accepting the grant, Bernita became part of a decades-long political debate. The National Parents Union paid for the grant with money from Vela Education Fund, which is backed by the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute. These groups advocate “school choice”—rerouting money and families away from traditional public schools through such means as charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, and vouchers, which allow public-education dollars to be put toward private-school tuition.

Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University and the author of “Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics,” told me that the Waltons “have been consistently a key funder of the charter-school movement.” Since 1997, the Walton foundation has spent more than four hundred million dollars to create and expand charter schools nationwide. In 2016, it announced plans to spend an additional billion dollars on charters.

School choice is an especially divisive subject in Michigan, where some of the country’s first charter schools were established, in 1994. Betsy DeVos , of Michigan’s billionaire Prince family, has invested millions, through donations and lobbying, to expand charters across the state. In 1999 and 2000, DeVos and her family backed an unsuccessful campaign, called Kids First! Yes!, to amend Michigan law to allow vouchers. In 2013, the Walton foundation doubled the budget of another DeVos project, the pro-voucher group Alliance for School Choice, when it announced a donation of six million dollars to send lower-income children to private schools. Three years later, DeVos published an op-ed in the Detroit News calling for the state to “retire” Detroit’s public-school system: “Rather than create a new traditional school district to replace the failed D.P.S.”—Detroit Public Schools—“we should liberate all students from this woefully under-performing district model and provide in its place a system of schools where performance and competition create high-quality opportunities for kids.” DeVos’s first budget proposal as Secretary of Education under President Trump, in 2017, would have cut nine billion dollars from federal education funding while adding more than a billion dollars for school-choice programs.

Advocates of school choice say that it gives low-income parents access to institutions that can better serve their children. Critics say that it lures highly motivated Black families away from traditional public schools and further hobbles underfunded districts. Presidents Clinton and Obama supported charters, but Democrats have largely cooled on them, and progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed curbing their growth. Michigan’s charters, most of which operate as for-profit companies, have consistently performed worse than the state’s traditional public schools. Yet parents continue to choose charters, which receive a large chunk of the more than eight thousand dollars per student that the state would otherwise send to non-charters, but aren’t subject to the same degree of public oversight. About half of Detroit’s students are now enrolled in charters, one of the highest proportions of any U.S. city.

The Walton foundation set up the National Parents Union in January, 2020, with Rodrigues as the founding president. Rodrigues’s oldest son, who has autism and A.D.H.D., was suspended thirty-six times in kindergarten alone; sometimes he was sent to a sensory-deprivation room that Rodrigues thought resembled a cinder-block cell. Eventually, a school representative suggested a charter school. “I didn’t know what a charter school was,” Rodrigues said. “I didn’t know I had any options. I just thought I had to send him to the closest school. I didn’t know there were fights like this in education. All I knew was ‘Oh, my god, are you kidding me—why are you doing this to my kid?’ ”

The National Parents Union was less than three months old when the pandemic closed schools. As well-off families set up private learning pods, Vela Education Fund gave Rodrigues seven hundred thousand dollars to help people with fewer resources, like Bernita, create their own. “There was an article in the New York Times about fancy white people in upstate New York creating these ‘pandemic pods,’ ” Rodrigues said. “But that’s how poor Black and brown folks survive in America—we resource-share. We don’t call them ‘pandemic pods,’ because that’s a bougie new term. For us, we called it ‘going to Abuelita’s house,’ because she watched all the cousins in the family after school, and that’s where you learned a host of skills outside of the normal school setting.”

Last summer, the nonprofit news organization Chalkbeat, which receives Walton funding, co-sponsored a virtual town hall on reopening Michigan’s public schools. Detroit’s superintendent, Nikolai P. Vitti, said that expanding to “non-traditional” options, such as learning pods, would hurt many of the city’s children. He warned that homeschooling, like charter schools, would undermine public education and cost teachers their jobs. Legislators were already drafting bills, he said, to take money away from schools so that children could continue learning in pods after campuses reopened.

“I don’t judge any parent for using the socioeconomic means that they have to create what they believe is the best educational opportunity for their child,” Vitti said. “We all do that, in our way, as parents. But that is the purpose of traditional public education, to try to be the equalizer, to try to create that equal opportunity.”

Bernita had logged on to the discussion from her kitchen. “Parents are not deciding to take their children out because of COVID ,” she told Vitti. “Parents are doing pods because education has failed children in this city forever.”

I asked Kija if it bothered her to accept money from the conservative-libertarian Koch family, who have spent vast sums of their fortune advocating for lower taxes, deep cuts to social services, and looser environmental regulations. “I guess the bigger question is, why don’t we have enough resources so that we don’t have to get money from them? It bothers me, yes—but why do they have so much money that they get to fund all of our shit?” she asked. “I shouldn’t have to get resources from the Kochs.”

Kija and Bernita describe themselves as Democrats. Bernita said that, in another era, she “would be a Black Panther with white friends.” She said that she was “at peace” with her decision to take money from the Koch family, because they fund several of the charter schools that Victoria attended, through their Michigan-based building-supply company Guardian Industries. She is not a “poster child” for her conservative backers, she added—the Koch family has no control over what or how she teaches. In a video about Engaged Detroit produced by Vela Education Fund, Bernita states, “If school won’t reinvent education, we have to reinvent it ourselves, and our goal at Engaged Detroit is to make sure families have the tools so that choice is in their hands.”

Vela Education Fund offered Bernita one year of funding, and in April she accepted another twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant, from Guardian Industries, to sustain her group through the next school year. Rodrigues imagines a scenario in which the per-pupil funding that public-school districts normally receive goes straight to a homeschooling parent. “Instead,” she said, “you have systems that are addicted to that money.”

Celine Coggins, the executive director of Grantmakers for Education, a collective of more than three hundred philanthropic organizations, including the Walton Family Foundation, says it’s not clear yet whether funders will continue to invest in homeschooling after the pandemic. Most are in “listening mode,” she said. Andre Perry, an education-policy expert at the centrist Brookings Institution, suspects that conservative-libertarian philanthropists will not prop up homeschooling as they have charters and vouchers, “but they will use this wedge issue to hurt public schools,” he said.

Perry was once the C.E.O. of the Capital One New Beginnings Charter School Network, which launched in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but he grew skeptical of the school-choice movement. Its funders tend to put their wealth toward alternatives to the public-school system, Perry told me, rather than lobbying state governments to implement more equitable funding models for public schools or to address the over-representation of Black children in special education. “Because of the pandemic, you’ve had organizations saying, Hey, this is an opportunity to again go after public schools,” Perry said. The Vela-funded homeschooling collectives don’t address root causes of educational disparities, he continued: “When people only focus on the escape hatch, it reveals they’re not interested in improving public education.”

Perry went on, “Slapping ‘Parents Union’ on something while you’re constantly trying to underfund public education—that’s not the kind of trade-off that suggests you’re interested in empowering Black people. It’s more of a sign that you’re trying to advance a conservative agenda against public systems.”

Six months into the pandemic, a consensus had emerged that many children, in all kinds of learning environments, were depressed, disengaged, and lonely in the Zoom simulacrum of school. “It’s Time to Admit It: Remote Education Is a Failure,” a headline stated in the Washington Post . “Remote Learning Is a Bad Joke,” The Atlantic declared. For some homeschoolers who rely heavily on online curricula, an all-screens, alone-in-a-room version of school can have a flattening effect even outside of a global health crisis. Kafele Gray, Kija’s son, who is now twenty-one and studying music business at Durham College, in Ontario, liked online homeschooling because it freed him from bullying. After two years, though, he was failing his classes and procrastinating, with assignments piling up. “It got kind of stressful,” he said. “You have to teach yourself and be on yourself.” He especially struggled with math. “When I’m in school, I’m better at math, because I have the teacher there to explain it to me—I’m seeing it broken down. When I was online, I would get it wrong, but I wouldn’t know why.” Still, when Kafele returned to his charter school, in eleventh grade, he’d learned to push himself to figure things out on his own. “School was less challenging” than it had been two years earlier, he told me. “I started getting A’s and B’s again.”

When the fall semester started, Bernita and Victoria tried to replicate the course load Victoria would have undertaken in a normal year. Bernita searched for online chemistry and trigonometry classes, and Victoria decided to take dance at the charter high school she’d attended before the pandemic. Bernita wanted the Engaged Detroit families to learn about Black history, so she signed them up for a six-week virtual course with the Detroit historian Jamon Jordan. Victoria bought pink notebooks and pens and a chalkboard for writing out the weekly schedule, and Bernita set up a desk for her daughter in the den. Though Bernita spent many hours on Zoom for her consulting work, the family ate lunch together most days.

As the semester continued, Victoria faded. She stayed up until seven in the morning and slept until two every afternoon, and she stopped doing chemistry. In October, Bernita told her that she couldn’t go on a planned post-pandemic trip to Los Angeles. Later that week, during her weekly coaching session with Kija, Bernita bragged about disciplining Victoria. Kija asked her to reconsider: teen-agers like sleeping in, and homeschooling allows kids to follow their natural rhythms. Besides, Kija said, Black kids are disciplined more than enough. Rather than punish Victoria, Kija suggested, Bernita should ask her daughter what she wanted to study.

The advice worked: Victoria replaced chemistry with a forensic-science class that met the state science requirements for graduation. She pored over lessons about evidence and crime scenes for hours at a time. By spring, she was waking up early to study for the core classes she needed to pass. One cold, sunny Wednesday, wearing a sweatshirt that read “Look Momma I’m Soaring,” Victoria sat down to puzzle out the trigonometry lessons that had always confused her. She emptied a pail of highlighters onto the table. At her high school, teachers hadn’t let her write in different colors, and she couldn’t make sense of her monochromatic notes. She opened a Khan Academy lesson on side ratios, and as the instructor explained the formulas for finding cosine and tangent Victoria drew triangles, highlighting each side with a different color.

The lesson included a nine-minute video and several practice questions. Every time Victoria attempted to find the cosine of the specified angle, she got the wrong answer. In a regular class, she would have pretended to understand. At home, she paused the video, rewound it, and flipped back through her notes. Eventually, she realized that she didn’t know which side was the hypotenuse. She Googled the word.

“The longest side of a right triangle,” she read. “Oh.”

She tried the formula for sine—opposite over hypotenuse—and this time a green check mark of victory flashed on her screen. Victoria solved for the angle’s tangent, and when she got it right she smiled. “O.K., I’m smart,” she said.

The parents of Engaged Detroit meet on Zoom every other Monday night. One evening in mid-March, Bernita set her laptop on the kitchen table next to a plate of broccoli and mashed potatoes. A dozen squares popped up on her screen, showing kitchens and living rooms from across the city. The parents updated one another on their children’s progress. Two preteens had started a jewelry-making business. An elementary-age boy with a stutter was relieved to be learning at home with his mom. Victoria watched for a minute, then went upstairs to feed her guinea pig, Giselle.

A mother, Jeanetta Riley, recounted how, at the beginning of lockdown, she had discovered that her daughter, Skye, a freshman in high school, was performing two grades behind in math. After she joined Bernita’s group, she found a tutor, and now, using Khan Academy, Skye had caught up to her grade level.

Person checks in on their friend who has been in child's pose for three weeks.

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Like Bernita, Jeanetta had thought of homeschooling as something only white people did. “A lot of Black people are struggling,” she told me. They don’t have the resources to stay at home all day teaching. Before the pandemic, Jeanetta worked long hours in customer service at the Fiat Chrysler plant. The company laid her off in March, 2020, and she isn’t sure when she’ll return to work. Skye is old enough to stay home alone, though, and Jeanetta plans to continue homeschooling after the pandemic, a decision some of her family members do not support. One relative berated her at a party for thinking she could take charge of something others go to graduate school to master. But Jeanetta was enjoying her weekly coaching sessions with Kija, and Skye seemed happier.

“I see such growth in her,” Jeanetta said. “She’s always painting stuff and bringing it to me. If that builds up her confidence, then I’m going for it. We didn’t even know she could paint. We didn’t know so much stuff about her. How is this my child, and I didn’t know?”

The day after the Engaged Detroit meeting, Victoria logged on to a dance class she was taking at the charter high school. Her teacher also joined from home, where she demonstrated the day’s lesson under a framed poster of the Beatles. She was a white woman who often played white music in class, Victoria said—that Tuesday, she streamed an Adrianne Lenker song as the students stretched. Victoria preferred R. & B., but she felt close to her teacher, who often e-mailed her to check in. Other instructors had disappeared early in the pandemic.

For the class’s final project, the teacher had encouraged the students to do something personal. Some choreographed a dance to music or to a poem. Victoria had written an original poem about being sexually abused as a child. Part of it read:

trauma can cause memory loss i physically remembered but consciously lost you’re so shaken up thrown around and tossed it’s up to you to ration the cost are you going to know who you are or cause family loss and you ask god to bring clarity on what you saw is this what defined who you are

Near the end of that day’s session, the teacher asked Victoria to stay online after class. When the other students had logged off, she told Victoria that she was worried about her poem. “I don’t want to censor anything,” the teacher said. “I just don’t know from a school standpoint that we can share.” The performances would be public, she said, for a “family audience.” She asked Victoria if she could revise the poem. “Some of the lines are very, very vulgar,” the teacher told her. (She was evidently referring to a stark couplet that switched the identity of “you” to disorienting effect: “you touched me in a way i never knew was true / before you could make anyone else hard he got hard off of you.”) Victoria slumped a little in her chair, but she tried to keep smiling. “O.K.,” she said.

A few nights later, Victoria opened an acceptance letter from Wayne State University. She’d won enough scholarship money to cover four years of tuition. With Pell Grant assistance, the amount came to more than thirteen thousand dollars a year. “That’s crazy,” she whispered to herself. She carried the letter around the house the next morning; she paused her trigonometry lesson to reread it. On her lunch break, buzzing with triumph, Victoria called her dance teacher on Microsoft Teams. She asked if, instead of revising her poem, she could add a trigger warning. The teacher said again that parts of the poem were “vulgar,” then laughed—a high-pitched giggle. If Victoria wanted to perform it, the teacher would need to consult with the school’s social worker: “I feel like there’s a fine line there, and I don’t know what’s acceptable for our audience.”

Victoria told her that she understood. She smiled, big and inviting, and she thanked her teacher for her time. “I appreciate it that you’re being understanding, that we’re having a good conversation about this,” the teacher said. “Other people would get into this intense thing.”

Bernita walked by and asked if she could speak to the teacher. Embarrassed, Victoria quickly closed her laptop.

“You just hung up on her,” Bernita said. “You know what I’m going to do is e-mail her, right?”

“Mom,” Victoria said firmly. Bernita stared back. Victoria bent over onto the table and buried her face in her arms. “She’s scared that [the teacher] is going to start acting funny with her,” Bernita told me. “That’s what always happens when she addresses something. The teacher turns around and starts feeling some kind of way about her, so she don’t want to address that, because she’s, like, ‘Just let me finish school.’ ”

She turned back to Victoria, who was sobbing.

“Ain’t that how you feeling?”

Victoria sat up to blow her nose, but cried harder. She nodded.

“People don’t know the damage they do to kids,” Bernita said. “She’s somewhere now thinking, ‘Oh, that went well.’ Baby, I’m going to e-mail her, O.K.?”

Victoria’s tears dropped onto her acceptance letter, soaking it.

Bernita suggested that she put her emotions into something creative, so Victoria collected herself and went upstairs to her room, returning with green and yellow ribbons and a pair of white Nike Air Force Ones. She wouldn’t have a normal high-school graduation. She wasn’t even sure what her high-school diploma would say. “Homeschool Academy”? But she wanted to celebrate, so she’d started planning the outfit she’d wear when the semester ended. Wayne State’s colors are green and gold.

For years, Victoria told people that she didn’t plan to go to college, because she feared no college would accept her. Now, the damp acceptance letter underneath her laptop, she wrapped a ribbon around the shoe and did what she’d done every year for the past twelve: she told herself that what came next would be better, and that, eventually, she’d find her place. ♦

An earlier version of this article misspelled Jamon Jordan’s name.

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How often do parents help their children with homework?

More parents of minority students than parents of white students reported providing help with homework.

  • More than 40% of parents of black and Hispanic students reported providing help with homework 3 or more times a week.
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  • Nearly 80% of black and Hispanic parents reported helping with homework at least one day a week, compared with 66% of white parents.

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8 Tips To Help Black Families Prepare for School Emotionally

Research shows that bias creates nuanced risks in school for Black and Brown children. But with parental involvement and these tips, Black families can help their children be emotionally prepared.

Once the new clothes are bought and backpacks are packed, parents and caregivers need the tools to help their kids start the school year successfully. As a Black teacher who has worked with mostly Black and Brown kids in the largest school district in the country, I understand the importance of preparing children to return to school. However, as a Black mother, I understand that our children need support that goes beyond the traditional concepts of school readiness.

Black and Brown children face additional pressures that non-Black children do not face. Research like Dr. Jamilia Blake's groundbreaking study "Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girl's Childhood" and the "Yale University Study on Racial Bias in Preschool Teachers" show that Black children are often seen to be less worthy of empathy. They also face anti-Black racism from teachers , and school staff, adultification bias and are given more severe punishments in schools than their non-Black peers, starting as young as pre-kindergarten.

However, there are ways Black parents can help inoculate their kids against the impact and effects of anti-Black racism and prejudice. Studies on the importance of parental involvement find parents being involved and communicating directly with their children's schools is one of the key factors in students' success. As Black parents and guardians, we can help our children prepare for school emotionally with these simple steps.

Show Them Stories Featuring Black Characters Going Back to School

Parents may find reading children's books about starting school featuring Black and brown characters can be a fantastic way to help ease first-day jitters. Culturally relevant children's literature can inspire hope and courage. Children's literature can also foster emotional intelligence. Children with emotional intelligence may find it easier to deal with new situations, like moving up a grade or starting school for the first time, because it helps them understand their feelings. Some of my favorite books are The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson and her follow-up, The Year I Learned to Fly . Another favorite is All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman.

Help Them Pick a Comforting Item To Bring to School

Have your child select a special item or photograph from home they can bring to school and help them feel secure. Your child should choose the item and photograph themselves because this item must be significant to them. This way, if they feel sad, anxious, or insecure at school, they can reach into their backpack or desk for that item and know they are loved and secure even while they are away from their family. It is important to communicate with your child's teacher that you have sent this security item to school with your child. Let them know that no one besides your child—including their teacher—is to touch or confiscate it.

Create Community With the Other Parents

Consider reaching out to future grade-level classmates' parents and start a WhatsApp, Google group, or email group. You can use this space to connect with parents and guardians from the same grade and share resources related to your child's class, homework, school supplies, volunteering, and more. One of the most helpful things you can do with your newly created Parent group is to organize a few meetups or playground playdates so that your children can meet other classmates from the same grade before the school year starts. Being in this community will help your child make friends throughout the school year and help you connect with other parents and support each other as your child continues their education.

Plan Your "How To Get to School Guide"

Even if the school is closed, it can be a good idea to prepare for school by visiting the building and familiarizing your child with their new environment. It can also be helpful to map out how you will get to and from school, make a few "test runs," and have your child draw or write about the journey home afterward. You can do this together by making a social story with a simple "How To Get To School Guide." If your child cannot write independently, have them draw the pictures while you write the words. Whatever you do with your child, make sure that it's interactive and that they get to lead the activity. This "practice" can go a long way in easing your child's anxiety.

Let Them Ask a Peer About the Journey Ahead

Discussing what happens during the school day or school year with your child can be helpful too. Try reaching out to some parents or guardians of children who have already completed the grade your child will attend. If you can set up a playdate, your child can talk to someone who has already attended that grade level. Let your child freely ask their "older expert" friend whatever questions they have. Let them exchange phone numbers and contact information so that the "older student" can become a mentor of sorts to your child if they are willing.

Meet With Your Teacher To Discuss Expectations

If you can, reach out to the teacher before the start of school and set up a meeting with your children's teachers. You can use this time to discuss academic expectations and your family's values and culture. This meeting is also a chance to discuss how your family's culture can be incorporated into the curriculum. I advise parents to ask how the teacher plans to incorporate Black culture into the curriculum beyond Black History month and Martin Luther King Day. Are there any specific holidays or events that you would like to share with your child's class or school? For example, I usually do a presentation about Kwanzaa as it's a big holiday for our family.

Create a "Get To Know Me" Cheat Sheet About Your Child

It can also be helpful to create a cheat sheet that introduces important information about your child. A simple word document in an outline form will do. The cheat sheet should include a photo of your child with your child's full name, birthday, and emergency contact information. Parents can list information such as their child's likes, hobbies, strengths, and the things their child is working on. Try to frame things in a positive light. For example, "we are working on learning how to organize our take-home folder and tying our shoes" works better than saying "they can't tie their shoes.

Meet With the Faculty and Staff To Discuss Accommodations

Does your child have a disability or specific health needs or food Allergies? Reach out to your child's school and set up a meeting to go over their Individualized Educational Plan (IEP), 504 Plan, and specific health needs in detail. As the parent or guardian of a child with an IEP or 504 Plan, special health needs, or food allergies, you and your child have rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA. The IDEA helps ensure your children's disability and health needs are met in public schools.

Important tip : Parents, make sure to include your child's IEP or 504 Plan in the document listed in your child's 'get to know me' cheat sheet.

Remember that it is perfectly normal for children to feel nervous or anxious about an upcoming school year, even if they have attended the same school previously. Allow your children to feel the full range of their emotions and express their feelings openly. We know parental and family involvement is one of the key factors in student success. Still, no one can define how that involvement looks for your family. It does not matter whether it's a grandmother or an auntie participating in story time, a godmother coming in and sharing a recipe or an uncle or big brother, or a cousin singing a song. Black parents and family remember we, and no one else, can define our children's success.

Heather Clarke is an educator, disability advocate, lecturer, and parent coach. She's also the founder and CEO of The Learning Advocate.

Homework Help for Reluctant Children

  • Posted October 15, 2018
  • By Heather Miller

mother and two daughters doing homework at kitchen table

It’s hard to fault the child who resists doing homework. After all, she has already put in a long day at school, probably been involved in afterschool activities, and, as the late afternoon spills into evening, now faces a pile of assignments. Parents feel it, too — it’s no one’s favorite time of day.

But despite its bad rap, homework plays an important role in ensuring that students can execute tasks independently. When it’s thoughtfully assigned, homework provides deeper engagement with material introduced in class. And even when it’s “just” worksheets, homework can build the automatic habits and the basic skills required to tackle more interesting endeavors. Finally, homework is a nightly test of grit. Adult life brings its share of tasks that are both compulsory and unenjoyable. Developing the discipline to fulfill our responsibilities, regardless of whether they thrill us, begins in middle childhood.

So how to help the avoidant child embrace the challenge, rather than resist it?

The first step, especially with kids 13 and under, is to have them do their homework at a communal space, like a dining room or kitchen table. If other children are in the home, they can all do their homework at the same table, and the parent can sit nearby to support the work effort. This alleviates some of the loneliness a reluctant child might associate with assignments. The alternative — doing homework at a bedroom desk — can result in the child guiltily avoiding the work for as long as possible. Like all forms of procrastination, this has the effect of making the entire process take much longer than it needs to.  

When parents turn the homework ritual into a series of conversations about what needs to be done, how, and for how long, children feel less “alone” with their nightly work, they relish the company and support of their parent, and they work better and more efficiently.

Many parents are under the impression that they shouldn’t have anything to do with their children's homework. This comes from schools emphasizing that homework is a child's responsibility, not the parents'. While it is absolutely true that parents should not do their children's homework, there is a role for parents — one that's perhaps best described as “homework project manager.” Parents can be monitoring, organizing, motivating, and praising the homework effort as it gets done. And yes, that means sitting with your child to help them stay focused and on task. Your presence sends the message that homework is important business, not to be taken lightly.

Once you’re sitting down with your child, ask him to unload his school bag and talk you through his various assignments. Maybe he has a school planner with all his homework listed, or a printout from school, or perhaps his work is listed on the classroom website. Many children attend an afterschool program where, in theory, they are doing homework. They’ll often claim that they’ve done all their homework, even though they’ve only done some. Together, make a quick and easy “Done/To Do” list. Writing down what she has finished will give her a sense of satisfaction. Identifying what she still needs to do will help her to focus on the remaining assignments. Over time, this practice will help your child build an understanding that large tasks are completed incrementally.

Next, ask your child to put the assignments in the order he’d like to do them. Encourage him to explain his thinking. Doing this helps a child feel in control of the evening’s tasks and prompts him to reflect on his work style. Discuss the first task of the night together. Ask your child to think about the supplies he is likely to need, and ensure they’re at the ready. This “pre-work” work helps a child think through a task, understand it, and prepare to execute it with gusto.

Last but not least, introduce a timer to the evening’s proceedings. Challenge your child to estimate how long the first assignment will take. Then ask, “Do you want me to set the timer for the full amount of time you think you’ll need, or a smaller amount?” Then, set the timer with the understanding that the child must work without interruption until the timer goes off. Even questions are verboten while the timer runs. The goal here is to enable the child to solve problems independently, through concentration. This not only builds concentration powers, it builds creativity, critical thinking, resilience, and resourcefulness. In my experience, the theatricality of being timed helps relax children who would otherwise feel daunted by a mountain of homework.

As each piece of work gets done, parents can add meaningful positive reinforcement. Exclaiming, “Another assignment done! And done well!” helps your child feel like what they are doing matters.

By turning the homework ritual into a series of conversations about what needs to be done, how, and for how long, children feel less “alone” with their nightly work, they relish the company and support of their parent, and they complete the work much more efficiently and at a higher standard than they might otherwise.

Helping the Homework Resisters

  • Have children do their work at a communal table. Stay nearby, to alleviate the loneliness that some kids feel — and to prevent procrastination.
  • Ask your child to unload her backpack and talk through assignments.
  • Help your child make a "Done/To Do" list.
  • Ask your child to put the assignments in the order he’d like to do them. Encourage him to explain his thinking — fostering a sense of control.
  • Use a timer. Challenge your child to estimate how long an assignment will take, and ask if she wants to set the timer for that full amount of time, or less. 
  • Your role: To monitor, organize, motivate, and praise the homework effort as each piece is done. 

Additional Resource

  • More about Heather Miller's work to help parents create healthy routines on weeknights

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Back off parents: It’s not your job to teach Common Core math when helping with homework

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Common Core math

While doing a math problem with my six-year-old recently during a classroom session for parents, I barked at her, “Just put the number in any circle.” She looked at me as if I was speaking a different language. Turns out, I was. Her teacher, who overheard the conversation, corrected me. The sum, she explained, goes in the top circle. Three circles form a pyramid and the bottom stack are for addition or subtraction while the top is for the total. I wrongly assumed order was insignificant.

Quartz

For months, I had been baffled by “number bonds,” a way of expressing math in circles that my daughter had to complete for homework. I never bothered to ask the teacher how they work. Instead, I soldiered on, demoralized but thinking, ‘Surely, I can do first-grade math.’ I’m not alone in my confusion.

Related: Could you answer these Common Core test questions?

“If you don’t know how to do it, ask your child to teach you, to show you how it’s done.”

Parents across the country are trying to make sense of Common Core standards, a set of academic expectations that call for less focus on memorization and more focus on explaining how solutions were found and, in English, a deep probe of text.

Advocates of the program argue that the skills are still the basic ones we learned as children but in the new curricula developed around the standards, the questions are often presented differently. That often means homework, an age-old source of angst for many families, has gotten even more complicated. Parents, like myself, are trying to guide children through questions that make little sense to adults who were taught math using other methods.

Before you throw up your hands and walk away from homework – a recent study in Psychological Science found that math-anxious parents who help children on homework breed math-anxious children – experts say there are several strategies you can try that don’t require relearning arithmetic.

DON’T TRY TO BE A MATH GURU

“The most important rule as a parent is to make sure it gets done. I may not have time to do an impromptu lesson on math but I can make sure everything is completed,” said Jason Zimba, one of the three lead writers of Common Core’s math standards and founding partner of Student Achievement Partners, a group that helps teachers with the standards. “It’s about managing work load and learning accountability.”

Although the father of two gives his children, ages 6 and 8, math tutorials on Saturday mornings, he says a parent doesn’t have to be a numbers whiz when it comes to homework.

“The math instruction on the part of parents should be low. The teacher is there to explain the curriculum,” said Zimba.

Related: Think you know a lot about Common Core? A new poll finds you’re probably wrong

Phoenix mom Kari Workman learned this recently when her fifth-grader was wrestling with a multi-step math problem and whining, “Oh, this is so hard.” As soon as Workman tried to look at the problem, her daughter snapped, “You won’t understand.” Mom called a time out.

“She was so frustrated that listening to me was not going to happen so I encouraged her to walk away from the assignment,” said Workman who is also a teacher. After a quick break, the 10-year-old returned in a calmer mood and solved the problem.

TALK TO THE TEACHER

Not all children will find solutions on their own, and if they are repeatedly stuck, that’s a sign they aren’t getting something in class and it’s time to talk to the teacher, experts said.

“If they are struggling with homework, that warrants a deeper conversation,” said Denver teacher Lauren Fine. “Don’t wait for those parent-teacher conferences. Make sure you are in touch with the school.”

Another strategy, she said, is asking the child to teach you the concept.

“If you don’t know how to do it, ask your child to teach you, to show you how it’s done,” said Fine. Often, she said, the kids get it, but parents don’t.

“In the past, I might have sent home worksheets with 40 problems, now it’s a couple of problems and the student has to show multiple ways of how they solved the problem. That can be frustrating for parents because they just want them to get the answer,” said Fine.

Related: Why many students with A’s in math don’t major in it

The struggle seems to bubble in third grade, said experts, when the math becomes more sophisticated. “It’s when it looks more different. It’s not just counting beans,” said Bibb Hubbard, founder of Learning Heroes, a group for parents.

“In the past, I might have sent home worksheets with 40 problems, now it’s a couple of problems and the student has to show multiple ways of how they solved the problem. That can be frustrating for parents because they just want them to get the answer.”

She acknowledged that watching children work through challenges can be tough for parents.

“The one thing we can reinforce as parents is that it’s ok for children to struggle. This is hard work. It takes time and patience,” said Hubbard. She likens it to learning how to tie your shoes. “It’s really painful to see them frustrated and angry. But I’m not going to tie their shoes anymore because they are 11.”

TEACH WHAT YOU KNOW WITHOUT STEPPING ON TOES

It’s ok, Fine added, for parents to show students how to solve problems using the ways they were taught in school – such as carrying numbers – as long as they are stressing that there are other ways to solve them.

Cece Hallisey, senior director of raisethebarparents.org, a site that outlines the new standards and offers resources on how to navigate them, has overheard her husband doing this with their daughters.

“There is nothing wrong with them learning in different ways but I wouldn’t be stubborn about it. Parents can say, ‘Don’t be surprised if you learn it differently in school,’” said Hallisey.

Related: Memorizers are the lowest achievers and other Common Core math surprises

And don’t bad mouth the teacher or assignment, teachers say. Instead, when time is scarce and tension is high, find resources for homework help.

“It’s about saying ‘If I can’t do the homework with them, who can?’” said Fine. Her school district, like many, offers before-school tutoring and the library has after-school homework help. Friends, family, babysitters and neighbors are also good resources as are websites such as bealearninghero.org, which breaks down standards by grade and subject.

Some schools are holding workshops that teach parents about the math and writing standards that students are learning in class. Zimba says schools should be better at educating parents on the standards and how to best guide students through them. “I think more can be done on the parts of schools, state leaders and district leaders on communication,” he said.

In the meantime, he said, parents should take the lead.

“When parents are frustrated, it’s important that educators listen to them, but they can’t listen unless the parents talk to them,” said Zimba, adding, “Venting is one thing but if you really want to solve the problem the way to do that is to start with the child’s teacher.”

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I still have my opinion about common core math after reading this article. As for asking the teacher for an explanation on how to help my son with his homework, well she won’t talk to us, answer emails and won’t return phone calls. I’ve had to resort to teaching my son how to do his homework my way even if it’s not what his teacher wants. One thing most teachers and government education officials don’t understand is how the real world works. For instance, if an employer sees one of their workers doing a task in a way that they see redundant or inefficient, the employee will not be employed there long. Today’s teachers are quick to jump to the conclusion that kids have a learning disorder or that they don’t pay attention. Personally, I think most of today’s teachers live in a fantasy land, and need to get back to what they were hired to do. Teach and help our children, not just hand them a packet of math questions to take home every night.

I find the tone of the article quite arrogant and condescending. Therefore I will respond in like tone. As an aerospace engineer who contracts for NASA, I can confidently say, yes, I AM that math guru. When my child asks me for help math, I show her the most efficient and expedient method to solve a problem. She is a bright kid and gets it. Her one complaint is always “that’s not how the teacher wants us to do it”. Common core to me is just dumbing down math for kids who need help. It’s a one size fits all approach that punishes the truly exceptional student, like my daughter. It is a tortuous approach that adds no value for student who are just naturally good at math.

Common core is making children hate math. I was hands off for several years nor did my daughter share anything about school. During COVID, I was able to see why. Common Core is overwhelming. Then I hear the teacher talking about Geometry. When I inquired about why a 3rd grade class was supposed to learn about Geometry when at that age I was memorizing and learning multiplication, the teacher gave me some BS answer about how kids need to learn the language of math, etc., etc. I called her out on the fact that the kids don’t need to know the language, but how to use it, and she had the vice principal call me. Come to find out, my daughter was not even able to add and subtract by 3rd grade and I’ve had to shell out a couple of thousand dollars for tutoring since the school wasn’t teaching her anything. Needless to say, I pulled her out of public school because it was not teaching her any basic education. Now we’ve moved to a more conservative state, are enrolling her in a private school and what d’ya know? They just changed over to Common Core math curriculum. Good grief!

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  • Homework for Black parents

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     NATIONWIDE ( BlackNews.com ) — A new school year approaches. As we start this new school year, I ask, how are you preparing your children for their return? Studies have shown an alarming number of African American children are low achieving. Statistically, and as verified by the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, less than 20% of Black students grades 4 through 8 are reaching proficiency. The remaining demonstrate poor performance in virtually all core subject areas-reading, writing, math and science-when test scores are compared with those students from other cultures and racial identities.

And, while causes for this disparity vary, there are many ways concerned Black parents can take the initiative and jump-start the new school year.

     How can we ensure our children get the most from their learning experience?

To get to the core of the matter, ask the following: what do I, as a parent, want for my child?

What does my child want for himself? Which subjects are of interest to my child and why? Is this preference because your child likes a particular teacher? Could this choice have been influenced by his peers or some other factor? During the summer, has my child met her summer reading requirements (I gave my students the names of authors, books, magazines and poems to read)? Our students fall behind because we fail to prepare them.

What do you want for your child? What does your child want for himself? Do you know which subjects are of interest to your child and why they have that interest? Is it because they like the teacher? Or, because of something or someone they know? Get to know your child and what interest him/her. During the summer did you have your child read and write? Our children are behind, quite frankly because we don’t prepare them.

     Why should you want your children intelligent and educated?

Is it because you want them to be excellent citizens who contribute to their community and to society? Or, is it because you want her to get a good job and be self-sufficient? Or, maybe it’s because you want them to think logically and to make intelligent decisions about their lives or eventually about your care and well-being.

     Education Begins in the Home

Reading is one of the most important things you can do with your child. Your child should begin reading as early as possible. In fact, you should begin reading to your child while she is in the womb. Read daily and read to your child and have him read to you. Discuss what you are reading. Read books and articles that are of interest to your child. Take your child once a month to the public library. Get him a library card. Have him read 2-3 books each month until he is able to read more. Talk to your child’s teacher and to the librarian to find out which books are age-appropriate. Model the behavior you want to see in your child. He should see you reading. Watch news program with your child so that he can hear words. This will increase his vocabulary especially if you explain words to him. Buy him a dictionary and require him to define no less than two different words 2-3 times weekly.

Veda Jairrels, in her book “African Americans and Standardized Tests”, state that one of the reasons African Americans don’t do well on standardized tests is because they don’t read enough and they do not experience reading early. She also states that many African American parents do not understand the amount of reading a child must do to maximize their scores on standardized tests.

Our students need balance in their lives. That is, they could do much better if both parents were involved in their literacy development. Seventy percent of our families are female headed and over 80% of our elementary schools are dominated by females. That observation is not an indictment against females, but our children especially our boys can benefit from more equilibrium and stability and positive male involvement in their lives.

Know his friends. They tend to influence each other. Get to know her teachers. If they know you are committed to his educational growth they will make every effort to assist you. If possible volunteer some time at her school.

Also, student discipline should never be the ultimate responsibility of the teacher. Over the years a variety of circumstances have changed: the structure of the family, attitudes of the parent and students, expectations placed on teachers and administrators, and society in general. Each of these effect student behavior and performance.

     The Dollar Store

I know you go there! I know because they must restock the shelves several times weekly. The dollar store has an excellent selection of educational items that you can use to help your child educationally. Buy your child a dictionary and a thesaurus. The dollar store has notebooks so your child can keep a daily log of his/her experiences. This is not like a diary. You want your child to learn to write as early and as often possible as well.

There are posters at the dollar store that you can use to teach your child: synonyms, homonyms, verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech. They have activity books that will assist you in helping your child in reading and writing. The dollar store has poster boards, glue and index cards you can use to make word walls. That is, you and your child can write positive words on the index cards and paste them on the poster boards so that you and your child can see and discuss them daily.

     The Salvation Army Stores

If you are not, or until you are more prosperous, try the Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries, and other second-hand stores for school uniforms. I have gone to many of these on occasions to purchase school uniforms for my students. Children didn’t have to know they came from these places, and they didn’t! Some students often feel shame if they have to shop at the Salvation Army. They wouldn’t if you discuss your circumstances with them. In addition to clothing, they also have a multitude of books and a wide selection of educational games at a nominal price that you can purchase to help your child develop.

     Teach Your Child Social Skills

As I mentioned before, discipline should not be the sole responsibility of the teacher. Teach your child how to get along with others. Teach them to share. A child who doesn’t learn to share, often have difficulty making friends. Encourage your child to make friends in the neighborhood and monitor what they do. Encourage your child to participate in extracurricular activities. Quite often these activities can assist in building character, satisfy interests and provide an opportunity to work with others. Teach your child to accept differing opinions and how and why he should respect the opinions of others. Tell them they don’t always have to be right. Teach them cleanliness and hygiene. Show and tell them how not to be offensive to others. Teach your kids how to deal with social networks. Quite often kids use these networks to bully other kids.

Try a church, synagogue or a mosque whatever your religious affiliation is. Even though you may not subscribe to a religious sect, these places of worship can provide assistance in your child’s social development.

Churches have been a staple of social, religious, and political activity in the African American community, literally, for centuries. Church is an excellent place to help your child develop social skills. Whether you are religious or not, send your children to a church that offers your child opportunities to listen, to read and to speak. There are a number of churches that have youth ministries that include programs for young people of all ages.

Remember to model the behavior you want to see in your child. What friends of yours do you expose your children to? Be what you want your child to be.

     Mommy Why Do We Move So Much?

Many of us are renters. Many of us are unemployed and can’t pay our rent. Some of us refuse to pay rent. As a result we move a lot. This affects our children. They are required to attend new schools, subjected to new teachers, and resigned to make new friends. They are sometimes bullied, afraid and isolated. This frequent movement can cause depression and anxiety in our children. Our children need stability. When they are familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with their friends and known by their teachers they perform better. When they feel comfortable they can be taught and they are respected.

     Conclusion

As parents, we must take the initiative and become involved in the education of our children. It is imperative that we work with others in their development. We cannot rely on the school alone to educate our children. No expert or entity should know your child as well as you do. Your child may come to school with a different personality than the one he left home with. This may or may not be positive for the learning experience he will receive. Ultimately the responsibility in educating your child relies on you, the parent. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree is a very real adage that holds truth. Try not to shift the blame for any denigrating behaviors on another tree. If you really want to know why your child behaves the way she does, simply look in your shoes.

Let’s have a good school year by being involved in the literacy development and education of your child.

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Homework as a Mental Health Concern It's time for an in depth discussion about homework as a major concern for those pursuing mental health in schools. So many problems between kids and their families, the home and school, and students and teachers arise from conflicts over homework. The topic is a long standing concern for mental health practitioners, especially those who work in schools. Over the years, we have tried to emphasize the idea that schools need to ensure that homework is designed as "motivated practice," and parents need to avoid turning homework into a battleground. These views are embedded in many of the Center documents. At this time, we hope you will join in a discussion of what problems you see arising related to homework and what you recommend as ways to deal with such problems, what positive homework practices you know about, and so forth. Read the material that follows, and then, let us hear from you on this topic. Contact: [email protected] ######################### As one stimulus, here's a piece by Sharon Cromwell from Education World prepared for teachers " The Homework Dilemma: How Much Should Parents Get Involved? " http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr053.shtml . What can teachers do to help parents help their children with homework? Just what kind of parental involvement -- and how much involvement -- truly helps children with their homework? The most useful stance parents can take, many experts agree, is to be somewhat but not overly involved in homework. The emphasis needs to be on parents' helping children do their homework themselves -- not on doing it for them. In an Instructor magazine article, How to Make Parents Your Homework Partner s, study-skills consultant Judy Dodge maintains that involving students in homework is largely the teacher's job, yet parents can help by "creating a home environment that's conducive to kids getting their homework done." Children who spend more time on homework, on average, do better academically than children who don't, and the academic benefits of homework increase in the upper grades, according to Helping Your Child With Homework , a handbook by the Office of Education Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. The handbook offers ideas for helping children finish homework assignments successfully and answers questions that parents and people who care for elementary and junior high school students often ask about homework. One of the Goals 2000 goals involves the parent/school relationship. The goal reads, "Every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children." Teachers can pursue the goal, in part, by communicating to parents their reasons for assigning homework. For example, the handbook states, homework can help children to review and practice what they have learned; prepare for the next day's class; use resources, such as libraries and reference materials; investigate topics more fully than time allows in the classroom. Parents can help children excel at homework by setting a regular time; choosing a place; removing distractions; having supplies and resources on hand; monitoring assignments; and providing guidance. The handbook cautions against actually doing the homework for a child, but talking about the assignment so the child can figure out what needs to be done is OK. And reviewing a completed assignment with a child can also be helpful. The kind of help that works best depends, of course, partly on the child's age. Elementary school students who are doing homework for the first time may need more direct involvement than older students. HOMEWORK "TIPS" Specific methods have been developed for encouraging the optimal parental involvement in homework. TIPS (Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork) Interactive Homework process was designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and teachers in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia to meet parents' and teachers' needs, says the Phi Delta Kappa Research Bulletin . The September 1997 bulletin reported the effects of TIPS-Language Arts on middle-grade students' writing skills, language arts report card grades, and attitudes toward TIPS as well as parents' reactions to interactive homework. TIPS interactive homework assignments involve students in demonstrating or discussing homework with a family member. Parents are asked to monitor, interact, and support their children. They are not required to read or direct the students' assignments because that is the students' responsibility. All TIPS homework has a section for home-to-school communication where parents indicate their interaction with the student about the homework. The goals of the TIPS process are for parents to gain knowledge about their children's school work, students to gain mastery in academic subjects by enhancing school lessons at home, and teachers to have an understanding of the parental contribution to student learning. "TIPS" RESULTS Nearly all parents involved in the TIPS program said TIPS provided them with information about what their children were studying in school. About 90 percent of the parents wanted the school to continue TIPS the following year. More than 80 percent of the families liked the TIPS process (44 percent a lot; 36% a little). TIPS activities were better than regular homework, according to 60 percent of the students who participated. About 70 percent wanted the school to use TIPS the next year. According to Phi Delta Kappa Research Bulletin , more family involvement helped students' writing skills increase, even when prior writing skills were taken into account. And completing more TIPS assignments improved students' language arts grades on report cards, even after prior report card grades and attendance were taken into account. Of the eight teachers involved, six liked the TIPS process and intended to go on using it without help or supplies from the researchers. Furthermore, seven of the eight teachers said TIPS "helps families see what their children are learning in class." OTHER TIPS In "How to Make Parents Your Homework Partners," Judy Dodge suggests that teachers begin giving parent workshops to provide practical tips for "winning the homework battle." At the workshop, teachers should focus on three key study skills: Organizational skills -- Help put students in control of work and to feel sure that they can master what they need to learn and do. Parents can, for example, help students find a "steady study spot" with the materials they need at hand. Time-management skills -- Enable students to complete work without feeling too much pressure and to have free time. By working with students to set a definite study time, for example, parents can help with time management. Active study strategies -- Help students to achieve better outcomes from studying. Parents suggest, for instance, that students write questions they think will be on a test and then recite their answers out loud. Related Resources Homework Without Tears by Lee Canter and Lee Hauser (Perennial Library, 1987). A down-to-earth book by well-known experts suggests how to deal with specific homework problems. Megaskills: How Families Can Help Children Succeed in School and Beyond by Dorothy Rich (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992). Families can help children develop skills that nurture success in and out of school. "Helping Your Student Get the Most Out of Homework" by the National PTA and the National Education Association (1995). This booklet for teachers to use with students is sold in packages of 25 through the National PTA. The Catalog item is #B307. Call 312-549-3253 or write National PTA Orders, 135 South LaSalle Street, Dept. 1860, Chicago, IL 60674-1860. Related Sites A cornucopia of homework help is available for children who use a computer or whose parents are willing to help them get started online. The following LINKS include Internet sites that can be used for reference, research, and overall resources for both homework and schoolwork. Dr. Internet. The Dr. Internet Web site, part of the Internet Public Library, helps students with science and math homework or projects. It includes a science project resource guide Help With Homework. His extensive listing of Internet links is divided into Language Art Links, Science Links, Social Studies Links, Homework Help, Kids Education, and Universities. If students know what they are looking for, the site could be invaluable. Kidz-Net... Links to places where you can get help with homework. An array of homework help links is offered here, from Ask Dr. Math (which provides answers to math questions) to Roget's Thesaurus and the White House. Surfing the Net With Kids: Got Questions? Links to people -- such as teachers, librarians, experts, authors, and other students -- who will help students with questions about homework. Barbara J. Feldman put together the links. Kidsurfer: For Kids and Teens The site, from the National Children's Coalition, includes a Homework/Reference section for many subjects, including science, geography, music, history, and language arts. Homework: Parents' Work, Kid's Work, or School Work? A quick search of this title in the Education Week Archives and you'll find an article presenting a parent's viewpoint on helping children with homework. @#@#@#@@# As another stimulus for the discussion, here is an excerpt from our online continuing education module Enhancing Classroom Approaches for Addressing Barriers to Learning ( https://smhp.psych.ucla.edu ) Turning Homework into Motivated Practice Most of us have had the experience of wanting to be good at something such as playing a musical instrument or participating in a sport. What we found out was that becoming good at it meant a great deal of practice, and the practicing often was not very much fun. In the face of this fact, many of us turned to other pursuits. In some cases, individuals were compelled by their parents to labor on, and many of these sufferers grew to dislike the activity. (A few, of course, commend their parents for pushing them, but be assured these are a small minority. Ask your friends who were compelled to practice the piano.) Becoming good at reading, mathematics, writing, and other academic pursuits requires practice outside the classroom. This, of course, is called homework. Properly designed, homework can benefit students. Inappropriately designed homework, however, can lead to avoidance, parent-child conflicts, teacher reproval, and student dislike of various arenas of learning. Well-designed homework involves assignments that emphasize motivated practice. As with all learning processes that engage students, motivated practice requires designing activities that the student perceives as worthwhile and doable with an appropriate amount of effort. In effect, the intent is to personalize in-class practice and homework. This does not mean every student has a different practice activity. Teachers quickly learn what their students find engaging and can provide three or four practice options that will be effective for most students in a class. The idea of motivated practice is not without its critics. I don't doubt that students would prefer an approach to homework that emphasized motivated practice. But �� that's not preparing them properly for the real world. People need to work even when it isn't fun, and most of the time work isn't fun. Also, if a person wants to be good at something, they need to practice it day in and day out, and that's not fun! In the end, won't all this emphasis on motivation spoil people so that they won't want to work unless it's personally relevant and interesting? We believe that a great deal of learning and practice activities can be enjoyable. But even if they are not, they can be motivating if they are viewed as worthwhile and experienced as satisfying. At the same time, we do recognize that there are many things people have to do in their lives that will not be viewed and experienced in a positive way. How we all learn to put up with such circumstances is an interesting question, but one for which psychologists have yet to find a satisfactory answer. It is doubtful, however, that people have to experience the learning and practice of basic knowledge and skills as drudgery in order to learn to tolerate boring situations. Also in response to critics of motivated practice, there is the reality that many students do not master what they have been learning because they do not pursue the necessary practice activities. Thus, at least for such individuals, it seems essential to facilitate motivated practice. Minimally, facilitating motivated practice requires establishing a variety of task options that are potentially challenging -- neither too easy nor too hard. However, as we have stressed, the processes by which tasks are chosen must lead to perceptions on the part of the learner that practice activities, task outcomes, or both are worthwhile -- especially as potential sources of personal satisfaction. The examples in the following exhibit illustrate ways in which activities can be varied to provide for motivated learning and practice. Because most people have experienced a variety of reading and writing activities, the focus here is on other types of activity. Students can be encouraged to pursue such activity with classsmates and/or family members. Friends with common interests can provide positive models and support that can enhance productivity and even creativity. Research on motivation indicates that one of the most powerful factors keeping a person on a task is the expectation of feeling some sense of satisfaction when the task is completed. For example, task persistence results from the expectation that one will feel smart or competent while performing the task or at least will feel that way after the skill is mastered. Within some limits, the stronger the sense of potential outcome satisfaction, the more likely practice will be pursued even when the practice activities are rather dull. The weaker the sense of potential outcome satisfaction, the more the practice activities themselves need to be positively motivating. Exhibit � Homework and Motivated Practice Learning and practicing by (1) doing using movement and manipulation of objects to explore a topic (e.g., using coins to learn to add and subtract) dramatization of events (e.g., historical, current) role playing and simulations (e.g., learning about democratic vs. autocratic government by trying different models in class; learning about contemporary life and finances by living on a budget) actual interactions (e.g., learning about human psychology through analysis of daily behavior) applied activities (e.g., school newspapers, film and video productions, band, sports) actual work experience (e.g., on-the-job learning) (2) listening reading to students (e.g., to enhance their valuing of literature) audio media (e.g., tapes, records, and radio presentations of music, stories, events) listening games and activities (e.g., Simon Says; imitating rhymes, rhythms, and animal sounds) analyzing actual oral material (e.g., learning to detect details and ideas in advertisements or propaganda presented on radio or television, learning to identify feelings and motives underlying statements of others) (3) looking directly observing experts, role models, and demonstrations visual media visual games and activities (e.g., puzzles, reproducing designs, map activities) analyzing actual visual material (e.g., learning to find and identify ideas observed in daily events) (4) asking information gathering (e.g., investigative reporting, interviewing, and opinion sampling at school and in the community) brainstorming answers to current problems and puzzling questions inquiry learning (e.g., learning social studies and science by identifying puzzling questions, formulating hypotheses, gathering and interpreting information, generalizing answers, and raising new questions) question-and-answer games and activities (e.g., twenty questions, provocative and confrontational questions) questioning everyday events (e.g., learning about a topic by asking people about how it effects their lives) O.K. That's should be enough to get you going. What's your take on all this? What do you think we all should be telling teachers and parents about homework? Let us hear from you ( [email protected] ). Back to Hot Topic Home Page Hot Topic Home Page --> Table of Contents Home Page Search Send Us Email School Mental Health Project-UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools WebMaster: Perry Nelson ([email protected])

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The Value of Parents Helping with Homework

Dr. selena kiser.

  • September 2, 2020

Young girl and mom high-fiving while working on homework.

The importance of parents helping with homework is invaluable. Helping with homework is an important responsibility as a parent and directly supports the learning process. Parents’ experience and expertise is priceless. One of the best predictors of success in school is learning at home and being involved in children’s education. Parental involvement with homework helps develop self-confidence and motivation in the classroom. Parents helping students with homework has a multitude of benefits including spending individual time with children, enlightening strengths and weaknesses, making learning more meaningful, and having higher aspirations.

How Parental Involvement with Homework Impacts Students

Parental involvement with homework impacts students in a positive way. One of the most important reasons for parental involvement is that it helps alleviate stress and anxiety if the students are facing challenges with specific skills or topics. Parents have experience and expertise with a variety of subject matter and life experiences to help increase relevance. Parents help their children understand content and make it more meaningful, while also helping them understand things more clearly.

Also, their involvement increases skill and subject retention. Parents get into more depth about content and allow students to take skills to a greater level. Many children will always remember the times spent together working on homework or classroom projects. Parental involvement with homework and engagement in their child’s education are related to higher academic performance, better social skills and behavior, and increased self-confidence.

Parents helping with homework allows more time to expand upon subjects or skills since learning can be accelerated in the classroom. This is especially true in today’s classrooms. The curricula in many classrooms is enhanced and requires teaching a lot of content in a small amount of time. Homework is when parents and children can spend extra time on skills and subject matter. Parents provide relatable reasons for learning skills, and children retain information in greater depth.

Parental involvement increases creativity and induces critical-thinking skills in children. This creates a positive learning environment at home and transfers into the classroom setting. Parents have perspective on their children, and this allows them to support their weaknesses while expanding upon their strengths. The time together enlightens parents as to exactly what their child’s strengths and weaknesses are.

Virtual learning is now utilized nationwide, and parents are directly involved with their child’s schoolwork and homework. Their involvement is more vital now than ever. Fostering a positive homework environment is critical in virtual learning and assists children with technological and academic material.

Strategies for Including Parents in Homework

An essential strategy for including parents in homework is sharing a responsibility to help children meet educational goals. Parents’ commitment to prioritizing their child’s educational goals, and participating in homework supports a larger objective. Teachers and parents are specific about the goals and work directly with the child with classwork and homework. Teachers and parents collaboratively working together on children’s goals have larger and more long-lasting success. This also allows parents to be strategic with homework assistance.

A few other great examples of how to involve parents in homework are conducting experiments, assignments, or project-based learning activities that parents play an active role in. Interviewing parents is a fantastic way to be directly involved in homework and allows the project to be enjoyable. Parents are honored to be interviewed, and these activities create a bond between parents and children. Students will remember these assignments for the rest of their lives.

Project-based learning activities examples are family tree projects, leaf collections, research papers, and a myriad of other hands-on learning assignments. Children love working with their parents on these assignments as they are enjoyable and fun. This type of learning and engagement also fosters other interests. Conducting research is another way parents directly impact their child’s homework. This can be a subject the child is interested in or something they are unfamiliar with. Children and parents look forward to these types of homework activities.

Parents helping students with homework has a multitude of benefits. Parental involvement and engagement have lifelong benefits and creates a pathway for success. Parents provide autonomy and support, while modeling successful homework study habits.

  • #homework , #ParentalInvolvement

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How Parents Can Help Children Who Struggle with Homework

A s a parent, it’s tough to see your child struggle with homework, and, of course, you feel the need to help. However, helping your child too much can make them dependent on you, so it’s important to know where to draw the line. The best approach is to help your child improve their study habits and skills so that they will have fewer problems with homework. 

Ways to help your child overcome their struggle with homework 

Help your child develop a positive attitude toward learning .

As adults, we resent being forced to do things we don’t want to do and our children are no different. Kids who have a negative attitude toward learning are more likely to struggle with homework. A simple way to help your child develop a positive attitude toward learning is to show them what’s in it for them.

For instance, if your child dreams of becoming a pilot, you can make a colorful flowchart showing how studying hard now can help her achieve her goals. Even if your child doesn’t know what she wants to become when she grows up, you can show her that there are endless possibilities if she studies diligently. This will provide your child with an incentive to learn, which will help to reduce issues with homework. 

Establish a daily homework routine 

A daily homework routine is very important as it sends your child the message that schoolwork is top priority. It is best to start this routine when your child is still young so that he or she will adjust to it and is less likely to struggle with homework issues later on. It is best to schedule homework time before TV or gaming time, and make sure that your child understands that they will not be allowed to watch TV or get on their phones until their homework is finished. 

Create a workspace for homework  

Think of your cubicle at work – it limits distractions, yet allows you to have a quick word with a team member when necessary – which is exactly what your child requires. If your child is struggling with their homework, they are more likely to get distracted. This is why a dedicated workspace is so important.

When deciding on the location of your child’s workspace consider if it’s going to be free of noise and distractions. For instance, don’t set up your child’s workspace in the living room if other family members will be watching TV during that time. 

Create a homework strategy that works for them 

A homework strategy will help your child track and complete multiple assignments without feeling overwhelmed by the workload. Some kids prefer to start with easier homework assignments and then move on to the tougher ones while others prefer to complete the more difficult tasks first.

A simple but effective way to help your child overcome their struggle with homework is to let your child experiment with multiple strategies until they find one that works. Younger kids have shorter attention spans so let your child take a five-minute break between assignments if necessary. 

And, for every age, if study periods run long, incorporate “ brain breaks .” We actually become less productive when we sit too long. A short break allows us to re-focus, destress, and work more effectively. (Pick up our Energizing Brain Breaks Printable for Kids here .)

Use multisensory techniques and study aids  

Researchers have found evidence that students learn a new concept more easily when it is taught using multiple modalities such as sight, hearing, and touch. For instance, when teaching your child a new word, tell him or her to say the word out loud while tracing it in salt or cornmeal using their fingertips. They should repeat this process several times, and then use a pencil to write down the word. This is especially helpful for tricky sight word for kids that don’t follow phonetic patterns. Engaging multiple senses in the learning process will make it easier for your child to study and will reduce their struggle with homework.

Similarly, if your child is older and having trouble with fractions, you can use an apple to help them understand the concept. You can cut an apple into equal portions, and then use the pieces to explain fractions in an innovative and enjoyable manner. You can even let them eat the pieces each time they get the right answer. These simple study aids will help to make learning fun for your child and help them overcome homework problems.

It’s equally important to pinpoint the root cause of homework issues, as it might just be a temporary problem. For instance, if your child has been sick with the flu, they may not have their usual energy, in which case, you can step in and help. Similarly, if your child is prone to seasonal allergies, they might find it tougher to focus during summer or fall, which would affect their studies. You can experiment with several natural ways to treat seasonal allergies in order to help your child recover quickly. 

Any mental stressors are important to address as well. Consult a professional for serious concerns, of course, but every child can benefit from mindfulness activities .

Parents, do you have any other ideas to help children who struggle with homework? Leave us a comment.

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How Parents Can Help Children Who Struggle with Homework

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COMMENTS

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  14. Is Daily Parental Help with Homework Helpful? Reanalyzing National Data

    These broad pronouncements may be misguided. When children are struggling in school, parents appear more likely to provide help with homework (McNeal 2012; Wilder 2014).This self-selection dynamic could explain the negative correlation between parental homework help and student achievement found in observational studies but not necessarily mean that parental help with homework causes harm ...

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    Helping with homework is an important responsibility as a parent and directly supports the learning process. Parents' experience and expertise is priceless. One of the best predictors of success in school is learning at home and being involved in children's education.

  21. How Parents Can Help Children Who Struggle with Homework

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