c‘is who finishes them all immediately and who is reduced to the ‘full immersion’ of the last few weeks. What is certain is that the holiday homework often end up being cause of tension between parents and children. Among adults, forced to act as gendarmes or a improvise teachers, And children, often listless and recalcitrant in front of pages and pages of exercises to complete.
So, like every year, the age-old dispute about the usefulness of summer homework resurfaces. A diatribe that sees, on one side, the supporters of holiday homework, which they see in the infamous summer subsidiary an essential exercise to review what they learned in school, and on the other hand, those who think of their holiday homework as an unnecessary burden, which often ends up burdening both children and parents.
Who is right? Difficult to say and perhaps wrong to ask the question in these terms. Because the teaema of holiday homework should first of all be considered from a broader perspective. How it helped us understand the doctor Laura Mazzarellieducator and founder of the project Il Cammino Pedagogico.
Holiday homework: how they should be understood
“You have to first of all reflect on the type of tasks – explains Dr. Mazzarelli. – Too often we forget that a task, to be truly effective, must be meaningful. That is, it must make sense for those who carry it out and be appropriate to the context. This means that, at school, one can do a certain type of assignment, because there is a teacher and a methodology to follow. At home, however, it should be different. Giving kids ten pages of tasks to do as a summer homework compels many times parents to improvise taughtoften on the basis of notions they have learned years and years before, in a different way from how the teacher explained them to their children. Creating fatigue and unnecessary tension».
At home different tasks
«Rather than assigning a holiday book to finish, it would be more useful then to think of some strategies that can allow children to consolidate the beauty of learning at home, with their parents – continues the educator. – Maybe they should be homework suggest experiences to share with mom and dad: exploring the world, reading, calculating groceries or studying an itinerary, visiting an exhibition. In short take advantage of what the children have learned at school, applying it to the dimension of the holiday. Summer should be the time to devote to cultivating one’s interests, to arouse the curiosity of children and teenagers. Performing exercises to consolidate learning should not be a task to be carried out with the parent but in the classroom. Instead the Children’s curiosity is often flattened by pages and pages of summer exercises which then maybe no one corrects».
The value of sharing
Where classic summer workbooks end up creating tension between adults and children, choosing carefully the tasks to be assigned would instead have the advantage of consolidating the relationship between parents and children.
«To get out of an executive approach teachers should focus on the valorisation of experience and sharing at home with his parents – underlines Dr. Mazzarelli again. – Mum and dad they shouldn’t be seen as the gendarmes who force you to do your homework but as people with whom meaningful experiences can be shared. A particularly important aspect, especially today when there is often no time to cultivate relationships in the family. Not only that, assigning experiences to be lived together with the parents as a task, it also benefits, once back in class, the relationship with classmates, because you can exchange stories of experiences and emotions lived. If, on the other hand, the children limit themselves to handing over the notebook with the operations carried out, the value of sharing with classmates is completely nullified. Everyone stays in their own executive world and that’s it.”
Holiday homework and sense of responsibility
As we said, there are many who think that holiday homework shouldn’t be assigned, because it’s useless. In fact, giving children homework to complete isn’t entirely wrong…
“The The pro of holiday homework is certainly that it allows the child to build a sense of responsibility, which the child still does not have autonomy in this sense – explains the pedagogist. – Learn to answerable to someone else, taking care of the way one’s work is presented, organizing oneself, is a demanding challenge for children. And in this the task can be useful. But as I said, not if the task is dysfunctionali.e. aassigned without taking into account the needs of each child he was born in his family background».
The role of parents
Often the tasks are reduced to the classic completed exercise book to bring back to school. And if the children have yet to learn to train organizational skills and a sense of responsibility, it’s easy to imagine how the burden of homework ends up weighing on the parents, struggling with a thousand doubts. For example, it is right to do homework together with the child or it is better to let them carry them out autonomy?
«As in all things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle – replies Dr. Mazzarelli. – AND just observe the child to understand where he may need an accompaniment. For example, the child may be able to do the exercise but not yet confident in reading and therefore may have difficulty understanding the assignment. It’s important do not replace the child but try to accompany him where he has more difficulty to support him in the acquisitions he still has to make”.
Rewards and punishments: best avoided
Often then, for parents grappling with their holiday homework, thehe temptation is to try to encourage children, placing on the bench la promise of rewards or the threat of punishmentof the type “If you don’t do your homework, you don’t play video games for a week”.
«Rewards and punishments, however, are dysfunctional – explains the educator. – Using the prize, I capture the child’s desire and use it as an instrument of power. In this way children are denied the opportunity to understand the underlying value of the request. The child acts only for an external motivation: he doesn’t do his homework to learn to answer for himself and his responsibilities, as it should be, but because then he gets something. Using rewards and punishments is more immediate and faster, it eliminates the contingent problem, but it doesn’t allow you to work on building a long-term consciousness. Not to mention that in this way the parents end up constantly live under blackmail because they must always grasp the child’s desire and modulate the requests and blackmails on what his interests are based on the different stages of growth».
Working on punishments no, on consequences yes
“It’s important confront the child with the fact that there are consequences – still suggests Dr. Mazzarelli. – Do not use blackmail but the consequence. Saying maybe ‘when you’re done drawing, we’ll go to the cinema‘. When but not self. This communication strategy applies in generalregardless of the tasks, because it opens up possibilities and is not based on blackmail”.
Don’t criticize the teachers
Finally, be careful not to criticize teachers.
“Six parents begin to complain about the homework, which is too much, and criticize the teachers, they do nothing but create an inner rupture in the child, for which the teachers are important reference figures – concludes Dr. Mazzarelli. – Today there is a lot of conflict between school and family, instead there should be an alliance, a pact. It is important that i parents can go to the teacher and share their efforts, and that together we can do educational research on the value of homework and perhaps even on the opportunity to assign them in a targeted way to each child. Remembering that, as we said, teachers have the task of carrying out the teaching-learning processto the parent to educate to values and to build meaningful experiences. School and family have in common the possibility to unite to nurture a love of culture and a desire for discovery».
In the gallery above, some strategies suggested by the educator to prevent homework from turning into a parent-child tug of war.
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