Homework at Shakespeare Infant School

Why is homework valuable?

At Shakespeare Infant School, homework is valued as an opportunity for children, parents and teachers to build a shared responsibility for learning.

We believe that homework can:

• enable children to consolidate and reinforce their skills and understanding, particularly in literacy and numeracy,
• encourage children to develop the independence, self-enquiry, resilience and self discipline needed to begin to study on their own,
• build an effective partnership between home and school,
• enable parents to be involved in their child's education,
• explore resources for learning that may not be available in school.

How can you help your child?

Parents and carers have an important part to play in ensuring that homework supports their child's learning and development. By supporting their child with homework parents can have a significant impact on progress.

We ask parents and carers to:

• make sure they are aware when homework has been set and help ensure it is returned on time,
• make sure that children have the necessary time to do their homework and a quiet space to work,
• encourage their child and praise them when homework has been completed,
• be actively involved in joint homework activities,
• let the class teacher know if their child experiences any persistent difficulties,
• be aware of how much time children are spending on completing homework.

Reading

Regardless of whether it is made explicitly clear, children are expected to read on a daily basis as an essential part of their homework.

We ask parents to read to their child regularly as well as hear them read, even when their child has become an independent reader. Young children also benefit from having stories read to them that they cannot read themselves.

MyMaths

Your child might be set an area of MyMaths for homework. They can also visit the website and choose areas to work on. Please encourage them to access the different areas of the programme which can make a huge difference to a child's abilities and confidence.

English

Children also have Literacy homework to complete usually writing sentences containing spellings learned that week. Please help your child prepare for a spelling class quiz by practising these regularly.

Topic related activities

Your child's class teacher may set a variety of other activities for homework that link with their topic work. These may be given as a separate task to complete over a couple of weeks, or may be set on Purple Mash.

If you have any queries about homework please see your child's teacher who would be happy to answer your questions.