Here are the top 14 reasons why Homework is important:

1. It improves your child’s thinking and memory
2. It helps your child develop positive study skills and habits that will serve him or her well throughout life
3. Homework encourages your child to use time wisely
4. It teaches your child to work independently
5. Homework teaches your child to take responsibility for his or her work
6. It allows your child to review and practice what has been covered in class
7. It helps your child to get ready for the next day’s class
8. Homework helps your child learn to use resources, such as libraries, reference materials, and computer Web sites to find information
9. It encourages your child to explores subjects more fully than classroom time permits
10. It allows your child to extend learning by applying skills to new situations
11. It helps your child integrate learning by applying many different skills to a single task, such as book reports or science projects
12. Howework helps parents learn more about what your child is learning in school
13. It allows parents to communicate about what he or she is learning
14. It encourages parents to spark your child’s enthusiasm

1. Make sure your child has a quiet, well-lit place to do homework.
   Avoid having your child do homework with the television on or in places with other distractions, such as people coming and going.
2. Help your child with time management.
   Establish a set time each day for doing homework. Don’t let your child leave homework until just before bedtime.
3. Be positive about homework.
   Tell your child how important school is. The attitude you express about homework will be the attitude your child acquires.
4. When your child does homework, you do homework.
   Show your child that the skills they are learning are related to things you do as an adult. If your child is reading, you read too. If your child is doing math, balance your checkbook.
5. When your child asks for help, provide guidance, not answers.
   Giving answers means your child will not learn the material. Too much help teaches your child that when the going gets rough, someone will do the work for him or her.
6. When the teacher asks that you play a role in homework, do it.
   Cooperate with the teacher. It shows your child that the school and home are a team. Follow the directions given by the teacher.
7. If homework is meant to be done by your child alone, stay away.
   Too much parent involvement can prevent homework from having some positive effects. Homework is a great way for kids to develop independent, lifelong learning skills.
8. Help your child figure out what is hard homework and what is easy homework.
   Have your child do the hard work first. This will mean he will be most alert when facing the biggest challenges. Easy material will seem to go fast when fatigue begins to set in.
9. Watch your child for signs of failure and frustration.
   Let your child take a short break if she is having trouble keeping her mind on an assignment.
10. Reward progress in homework.
    If your child has been successful in homework completion and is working hard, celebrate that success with a special event (e.g., pizza, a walk, a trip to the park) to reinforce the positive effort.

1. Have your child read aloud to you every night.
2. Choose a quiet place, free from distractions, for your child to do his nightly reading assignments.
3. As your child reads, point out spelling and sound patterns such as cat, pat, hat.
4. When your child reads aloud to you and makes a mistake, point out words she has missed and help her to read the word correctly.
5. After your child has stopped to correct a word he has read, have him go back and reread the entire sentence from the beginning to make sure he understands what the sentence is saying.
6. Ask your child to tell you in her own words what happened in a story.
7. To check your child’s understanding of what he is reading, occasionally pause and ask your child questions about the characters and events in the story.
8. Ask your child why she thinks a character acted in a certain way and ask your child to support her answer with information from the story.
9. Before getting to the end of a story, ask your child what he thinks will happen next and why.

The grocery store is one of the best examples of a place where the ability to use mathematics is put to work in the “real world.” It’s a great place to practice measurement and estimation and to learn about volume and quantity and their relationships to the sizes and shapes of containers—geometry!

Here are some tips to make your grocery shopping a very interesting learning experience.

• To help your child learn about collecting data, involve him in preparing the shopping list at home before going to the grocery store.
• While at the grocery store, allow your child to find the items on the shopping list.
• Give the child a pencil, and tell him to make a check mark next to each item you buy. If you need more than one piece of an item, such as cartons of ice cream, tell him how many checks to make beside that item.
• Help him to compare prices for different brands of the same items to see which items are the best buys. Ask your child questions such as, “Which brand is cheaper?” Have him estimate.

Being able to recognize how different shapes are used in common settings helps children to understand geometric principles, such as shape and quantity, and the relationships among them.

• At the store, ask your child questions to focus her attention on the shapes that you see. Ask her to find, for example, items that have circles or triangles on them or boxes that are in the form of a cube or a rectangular solid.
• As you shop, point out shapes of products: rolls of paper towels, unusually shaped bottles, cookie boxes shaped like houses. Talk with your child about the shapes. Ask her why she thinks products, such as paper towels and packages of napkins, come in different shapes. Have her notice which shapes stack easily. Try to find a stack of products that looks like a pyramid.
• Ask your child for reasons the shapes of products and packages are important to store owners. (Some shapes stack more easily than others and can save space.)

Putting away groceries helps children develop classifying and mathematical reasoning skills and the ability to analyze data.

• When you go back home, make a game out of putting away groceries. As you empty the bags, group the items according to some common feature. You might, for example, put together all the items that go in the refrigerator or all the items in cans.
• Tell your child that you’re going to play “Guess My Rule.” Explain that in this game, you sort the items and she has to guess what rule you used for grouping the items.
• After your child catches on to the game, reverse roles and ask her to use another “rule” to group these same items. She might, for example, group the refrigerator items into those that are in glass bottles or jars and those in other kinds of packaging. She might group the cans into those with vegetables, those with fruit and those with soup. When she’s regrouped the items, guess what rule she used.

Time flies when you’re having fun, but if you’ve ever tried to explain to an impatient preschooler that his birthday is a week away, you’ll realize that the concept of time does not come easily to children of this age. Learning the days of the week and the months of the year is standard procedure in preschool curriculum, but what can you do to help your child understand this complex concept at home?

Time is a hard concept for preschoolers. It isn’t something that they can touch, feel and explore. Without the ability to tangibly interact with time, children need adults who understand the concept to help them learn about time.

Learning a song with the days of the week is one way. Children love to sing! Learning becomes fun and easy through music and rhyme. Children soon learn, when noted on a calendar, that Mondays are the days we go to the library. Tuesdays are the days that grandma picks me up and Saturdays and Sundays are the days I stay home and don’t go to school.

Want to get started? Try a few of these simple ideas at home to help your child grasp the complex idea of time.

Create a Calendar
Purchase a calendar for your child to keep in his room. You may want to get some special stickers to mark birthdays and holidays. Write in special events such as birthday parties or school performances as well as weekly classes or events. Show your child how to mark off each day with an “X” before he goes to bed. This will make it easier to count down the days to highly anticipated days.

Use “Timely” Words
Use words to indicate time such as yesterday, today and tomorrow when you are talking with your child. When these words are used in context, especially in conjunction with a calendar, it helps make the concept of time more concrete. Talking with your child about his weekly schedule (for example, “We go to gymnastics on Tuesday and that is tomorrow”) and then showing him the day on the calendar will be helpful. Definitions of time such as “next year” become more difficult because it is too long of a time for a child to wait. “Words that explain ‘next year,’ such as ‘when you turn 4′ or ‘when you are in Mrs. Duffy’s class’ help stage a framework that makes sense to a preschooler.”

Make a Countdown Chain
For those very special days such as birthdays and holidays, you can make a visual and interactive countdown chain to help the time pass more quickly!

Do you have other interesting ideas?

Millions of children love video games, especially boys. How can you know if your son/daughter is heading for trouble?

You should be concerned if your child:

• Repeatedly breaks family rules about when and how much game playing is allowed.
• Withdraws from friends and activities to spend time playing.
• Sneaks and lies about game playing.
• Neglects school work and other responsibilities.
• Throws temper tantrums when limits are imposed.

Tips to make sure computer and video game playing remains a positive part of your children’s lives:

• Set clear ground rules about when, where, how much, and what kind of game playing is allowed.
• Limit game playing time.
• Require that homework and other chores be completed first.
• Keep video and computer games out of children’s bedrooms.
• If your child refuses to cooperate, restrict access for a period of time.
• If nothing else works, go cold turkey. Get rid of the games.