Homework and a 4 Year Old

I taught for HeadStart for 15 years and have a great appreciation for those parents who attemp to help their children with homework.
Your child is around others who are also sitting down doing homework, and its implemented in a daily routine. Try giving homework to your other child also and do it daily.
My daughter is in preschool, they have homework weekly, and I make my own homework for her with things she need extra help on. She to throws a fit and tries to rush thru or not do as good as I know she can. I have started a routine to work up to doing homework. We SAY the alphabets, count, sing, and etc then we finish with the homework. We have a saying that we are working our hands to the bones. My daughter is just now showing an intrest in learning. I use to tell her she needed to know this in order to goto kindergarten. She could care less about kindergarten, now when she is doing her work she gets excited about kindergarten.
Although many people are against littleones in homework, she is being prepared for "Big School". I have many friends that teach for the public schools, and the teachers all want the kids that have gone to HeadStart, because they are usually advance.

1 mom found this helpful

I don't know if you have tried this, but I would try doing "homework" of your own by her side. You could copy her work and do it or you could do something similar while she is working. The improtant thing is to have your time together while she is working.
S. R
Mother of 5

1 mom found this helpful

from my experience in working in early childhood the homework packets are sent home so that parents and children can spend quality time together, the parents are aware of what is going on in the classroom, and what their child is learning at school. If your child is doing good at school and is progressing properly there should be no concerns. You should not force her to do it that will only cause worse problems like the ones you have decribed. I wish that when I was teaching that parents were concerend about getting it done I always felt I was wasting paper and ink making the sets to send home. I would just ask occasionally if she would like to show you what she has been learning at school and if she would like to do this paper to show you. If she completes it or attempts it make a big deal of it. If she doesn't just let her know that you know she is smart and maybe sometime she would like to sit WITH you and work on it. Make a special place to leave the packets out where your daughter can find them on her own, any time she wants, and she just might surprise you by working on it in her time not when mom says it is home work time. Remeber, every child is different and try not to compare, I no that is not easy as a mother or a teacher. Hope these ideas help. This makes me want to go back to pre-k.
May the Lord be with your family,
M.

1 mom found this helpful

The best advice I can give you is stay on a schedule...if I get off schedule with my son (who is in head start), I can forget it. Also...don't go for perfection, if she scribbles all over the paper, so be it...that is where she is at. This is headstart, there is no grade. The idea is to get her use to doing something at home after school, you don't want her to hate school and homework right out of the gate.

1 mom found this helpful

have you tried sitting down at homework time with her. I know you have other things to be doing, but that is how I finally broke my oldest of the habit of blowing off homework. When it is homework time I sit down too. No TV, or radio. The kitchen chores, and laundry have to wait. I sit and pay bills, or just do crosswords. When he finally realized that it was quite work time, he stopped fighting it.

1 mom found this helpful

My six year old was the same way. My advice is for you to color in front of her and have fun at it without asking her to join. Color out of the lines even or draw your own picture. Sometimes my son would join in for a few seconds and other times he couldn't be less interested. The fact is simply no two children have the exact same interests, development rate, or learning style. My son gets frustrated very easily and is very much a perfectionist. If he fears he won't get something perfect he doesn't even want to try. You might try other small motor skill activities with your 4yo, maybe homework itself isn't what frustrates her it could be just that she isn't all that comfortable with using those small motor skills. toys like small legos, or those tiny doll sets with a thousand tiny pieces. Just an idea. Whatever you do don't push her if she gets frustrated guide her attention away for a while. Instead encourage her, try to peak her interest by visual example maybe let her see you reward yourself after coloring your picture. If there is one thing I've learned about my children its that the easiest way for me to get them to do anything is to help them enjoy it and before they will enjoy it they want to feel like they are good at it.

1 mom found this helpful

Not sure what else is included in the homework other than the coloring you mention, but does the 4 year old have any coloring books or other pages that she likes to color? If so, perhaps you could get a few of those pages and a homework color page together. Get your daughter to color a page from her favorite coloring book first, then try to work in the homework page.

Maybe there are some other fun ways to get her in the mood to do the other homework. My daughter is only 2, so we haven't hit the homework yet! Lately she always tells me to draw a tree for her...I hope that doesn't lead her to expect me to do her homework for her! ha!

1 mom found this helpful

If you would like your 4 year old to do the work sheets an idea might be to make a game of it. When my daughter was 5 I would set an egg timer and say see how much you can do in 15 mins. Once the time was over we would look at what she did and I would praise her on the good work.

1 mom found this helpful

I wonder if the youngest might be bored with the work involved. I failed coloring in Kindergarten because I thought it was stupid and a waste of my time. I was reading then, so I always wanted a book. If she's doing well with the material she's been given, you might as the teacher if she can have more advanced work. Good luck!

1 mom found this helpful