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Enjoy Teaching - Message from L. A. by Junko Nakamura
Homework Club
Walteria Elementary School provides 2nd through 5th graders with “the Homework Club”: an after-school program where the students do their homework. They can ask the teacher if they have questions and get help with their homework. The Club has about 20 students including both the English speaking students and the English language learners (ELL). Since I have heard Japanese parents saying that homework is hard and that they wish they could have a teacher who could understand Japanese, I offered the school to work as an assistant at the Homework Club to help the ELL. The ELL students are likely to have difficulty doing homework due to sometimes insufficient comprehension of the subject content.
What kind of homework they are assigned depends on their classroom teacher. Some classes have a couple of assignments each day, other classes have a set of homework on the 1st day of the week as a whole week's task. As for content, they are basically supposed to work on math and spelling every day, since they often have a spelling test at the end of the week. And the emphasis is also on reading; they have to fill in a “Reading Log", a record of how many minutes they read that day.
My son's teacher has a very unique homework system. He passes out a sheet of math problems including easy questions and difficult problem solving as homework from among these questions students choose any 5 questions they want to do according to their ability level and motivations. I think it is an unique, student-centered approach to homework.
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