Parents as educators
Yeronga State School strongly values the important role of parents as educators too. The way you talk to your children, the routines you establish around meal times and bed times, the toys and resources you provide and the activities you engage in carry strong messages to influence their growing minds. The term `domestic curriculum’ is used by Claxton and Lucas in their book `Educating Ruby’ to highlight the importance of the way you do things as parents that fosters children’s confidence, creativity, communication skills, collaboration skills, craftsmanship and critical thinking. Yeronga State School has a `home learning policy’ rather than a homework policy to provide opportunities for parents to partner with their children in learning.
Why Home Learning?
Homework is one of the most polarising and divisive issues for school communities. The research can support an argument for or against homework due to the difficulty identifying what homework makes a difference, if any. John Hattie, education researcher, conducted a meta-analysis of what works in education, identifies homework as having an effect size of 0.19. This is not negligible however in education an effect size of 0.4 is the ideal. This is mostly due to the types of homework tasks and the negative attitude children can adopt towards homework if there is limited choice and over commitment of time.
Home learning acknowledges the many activities our students engage in outside school hours. Extra-curricular activities such as Art classes, Instrumental music practice, sports training, drama classes, dance classes, robotics clubs, chess clubs etc. provide great opportunities for our children to grow as learners. In addition, parents can teach children how to garden, cook, play games like Scrabble and computer games, and love history and science through visits to museums and watching documentaries etc. Yeronga State School Home Learning plan is building on this partnership.
Home learning is about providing opportunities for parents to partner with their children to learn some non-negotiables and child interest topics. The importance of rich dialogue in deepening children’s understanding of different topics and allowing them to transfer learnings to different contexts is widely supported. The focus of home learning therefore is to foster students’ automaticity with essential foundational skills such as Reading and Maths, as well as fostering parent children partnerships by providing learning opportunities for rich dialogue and/or fostering a child’s self-regulation of learning. Student agency (voice and choice) and student engagement has been shown to increase given greater ownership of their learning.