Taking the Hell out of Homework: Tips and techniques for parents and home educators

Boost your child’s confidence; banish the tears and end the battle over homework with this wonderfully crafted book. Lots of ideas and strategies for breaking homework or home schooling tasks down into manageable learning experiences in this colourful, easy to follow toolkit.

Homework can often be a source of family strife and argument, particularly for students who struggle academically. All too often homework is seen as having to do more school work at home and an unwelcome intrusion into private time when students would rather be listening to their favourite music, watching the TV or a movie or chatting online with their friends.

Taking the Hell Out of Homework is a rich source of ideas and strategies to help students complete homework more easily and with less stress. It is also a book for parents and carers who are desperate to help their children with homework but who are not sure how to do it.

Simple strategies and tricks of the trade are presented which are easy to use and effective for 6 year olds to 16+. The techniques have been used in special "Parent and Child" workshops throughout the UK and in New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. Parents that have taken part in the workshops know that these techniques work: now you can learn them too.

Table of Contents

Section 1 - Strategies and Approaches

• Working with your children at home
• The right to learn differently
• How does your child prefer to learn?
• Learning the way you learn best
• Putting knowledge into practice
• The Shopping List quiz
• Personalising the learning process
• The power of paired reading
• Paired reading and a typical homework task
• TCP-QR a technique for comprehension tasks
• Paired reading and learning for tests
• Revising for tests and exams
• Spelling
• Personalising the spelling process
• Happy-clappy spelling - a quick fix solution
• Make and Break - for learning tricky words
• Getting ideas down on paper
• A staged approach to getting ideas down on paper
• Planning with mind maps
• Managed behaviour for learning
• Working smart not hard

Section 2 - Materials and Practice Activities

• Core learning strategy table
• Getting ideas down on paper: mind map frameworks
• Learning how to learn: the Police kit list
• Summary table - How to learn a list
• Using Paired Reading to create learnable lists
• Using TCP-QR for comprehension homework
• The Venus task