With school being almost out around here, I’m getting told by my kids’ teachers about the work they need to get done over the summer. It’s understandable… I mean, I know that kids forget a lot over summer vacation. But how much do I really want to push them?

I like thinking back to my own summer vacations as a kid, which were pretty leisurely. My school didn’t even give summer reading lists.

My daughter has about 3 pages of recommendations for what she should be doing over the summer to get ready for second grade. My son has a big packet from his speech therapist, which really isn’t quite the same in my view, as most of it is games to play to help him speak better, which is a real issue for him and something that needs to get better, ideally before he hits kindergarten.

And so I’m thinking on how much of this stuff I really feel like doing.

My own preference is to primarily make the tools available and encourage their use. I did tell my daughter that yes, she will be reading during the summer. She had been trying to say that she’d just do that every other summer. Kids!

I don’t really think she’ll try to not read all summer. She enjoys it too much.

Honestly, at this age I’d rather let them lead the way during the summer. We have plenty of workbooks and I’ll encourage their use, but that’s really all it takes most of the time around here.

So what’s your plan? Does your child’s school recommend or require summer homework?

Using StumbleUpon the other day, I came across an article on arguments against homework. The article’s a few years old, but schools still give so much homework I found it interesting.

In first grade, my daughter gets 4 nights of homework a week. She has a total of 3 pages of math plus 3 assignments to help her learn a spelling list of 9 words, plus 20 minutes of reading a night.

I have to admit, I like the 20 minutes of reading a night. So does she. We often go over on that one. She even reads on her own sometimes.

But I found it very interesting that there’s no evidence that homework in the early years has any benefit at all.

Just think about it. Kids spend about 7 hours at school, then have to do homework too. That’s a pretty tiring day for a kid. And very little time for play.

It’s not an easy thing for schools to admit that homework might not be worthwhile, especially when they’re under so much pressure to show great academic results. It’s a rather troubled system these days.

My own feelings on this topic are pretty mixed. There are some areas where my daughter definitely needs improvement, but the main one is penmanship. She’s a sloppy writer even for a first grader. Then again, I’m not that neat a writer either.

But I’m also starting to get this feeling that if I wanted to spend time helping my daughter learn, I may as well homeschool. It would take more of my day, but less of hers and let her be more of a kid. If that made for a better attitude toward learning, it would be worth it. Just now she feisty, to put it kindly, about a lot of topics, and work in class and at home can take her far longer than it should just because she’s bored.

The trouble comes from homework that is more or less busy work. In the lower grades it’s hard for teachers to assign anything else. It can be more effective, I gather, in high school.

At any rate, I’m thinking more teachers and school administrators need to read The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. So do parents. It’s worth questioning the worth of most homework assigned.