I have one other gripe about homework. For years now, my daughters get sent home the assignment of writing your spelling words 3 times each.
My gifted daughter already knows how to spell most of her spelling words before she even gets her list, so why should she write them 3 times each.
My other daughter gets so tired from writing, and she doesn’t really have time to study the words.
How about the teachers assign a spelling list, and just test the kids at the end of the week. The kids (and parents) will figure out the best way to study the words at home.
How many words do your kids get? Mine get 25-30 every week. We only got 10 a week when I was a kid. Here’s how spelling went way back when:
Monday: Pre-test. This test did not count toward your grade, but if you got words wrong, you wrote those words 10 times each. Get them right and you don’t have homework that day.
Tuesday: Write each word in a sentence. More than one sentence that starts with “I” and it was marked wrong.
Wednesday: Write a SHORT paragraph using as many spelling words as you can. The paragraph had to make sense, and if you used them all, you got a gold star.
Thursday: Write the words in alphabetical order and study.
Friday: Final test. This was the one that counted. Penmanship counted, too. If it was sloppy, it was wrong.
As an aside, in the third grade, multiplication tables were a standing order. You wrote them out 10 times each no matter what. This resulted in having them indelibly printed on our brains forever. We couldn’t forget them if we tried.
Oh! That reminds me of the time our class did something VERY bad (don’t ask me what it was; I don’t remember) and the teacher assigned the following as punishment: Write the muliplication tables 10 times each, but write them in ROMAN NUMERALS. AHHHH! (Worked though... never had to do it again.)
Regards,
If your special needs daughter is on an IEP or a 504 and you do not think she needs more writing practice at home, have her use the computer to type her spelling words. or if typeing is a problem to maybe use a voice recognition type of thing to type them. This would fall under a resonable accomodation. (also look around on share ware sites to see if you can find some type of spelling game that allows you to put your own spelling list into it, I found one 10 yrs ago and I even thought it was fun)