Holiday Homework

As the summer vacations approached, my daughter started to look forward to all the fun that she was going to have while I started to fret about all the homework that I would have to help her with (she is in class 1). The saving grace to all this was that, most of my daughter’s homework turned out to be very interactive and innovative. The main focus being around family and the neighborhood, which in one way is also like an extended family.

One of the things that she was supposed to do was to find out facts about her immediate neighbors and document them with the help of a small questionnaire that was provided by the school. She also had to draw all the members of this family, which was a lot of fun for her. She was also able to learn a lot about our neighbors, their ways of life, their traditional clothing, their food and so on.

She was particularly fascinated by their ethnic garments, (they are from Haryana and the elders wear the traditional ghagra with a kurti) My daughter really liked that they would wear lehenga ( as she put it ) everyday, while she only got to wear it on festivals and weddings.

Another assignment required her to make a collage of pictures of important things from around her neighborhood. Both she and I had a great time while she was busy clicking all sorts of pictures, once we were back we both selected a few that were appropriate and she advocated for each one on how it was so relevant in her life.( She thought the picture of the atm was very important since we got our money from there ?)

She was supposed to practice her writing and reading skills. The school had made it very simple, she could read any book (both Hindi and English) and then find the difficult words, write them down and then make sentences to fully understand their meanings.

I realized that she was enjoying her homework and even looked forward to doing it, and that is how it should be.

While I spoke to some of our neighbors I found out that most of the children had homework in the form of some sort of project and in most cases the mom had done almost 60-70 % of the said projects. They were very stressed since there was too much to do and not enough time. One of the mothers had even researched the internet to find out material for a report that the child was supposed to write and all the child did was copy it in his own handwriting, it left me wondering whether this was what the school had intended or was this a fall out of too much homework??

I agree my daughter had a lot of fun but then there are other kids and parents who did not, because their homework was not age appropriate

At the end of the day I cannot help wondering, we think that the schools knows best what is right for our children but are we really sure that they are taking the right call?? Can we intervene?? Do we get to have a say??