Tag: parenting

Adventures in Homework

Tales from the 5th Grade – Part 2

Hey parents – can we talk for a second? How’s homework going at your house?  Is it always as tranquil and compliant as in my house?  Do you look forward to sitting down to help your little angel with essays and history and complex math problems?  Isn’t it the highlight of your evening?  Yep, me too.

Homework is not a fifth-grade phenomenon.  We’ve been at it since kindergarten.  For better or worse, our kids attend a school that stands squarely on the ‘homework builds discipline’ side of the fence.  Our fifth grader spends 30 to 90 minutes on homework every school day — 45 minutes is about average at our house — in addition to reading and other extra-curricular activities.  The thing about fifth grade homework is that it’s the first time I’ve really been challenged by the assignments.  I mean, when was the last time you labeled the parts of a volcano or recounted the battle of Yorktown*?  

Save for learning to read, fifth grade seems to be when the real ‘you may have to actually use this stuff later’ knowledge begins.  There’s definitely something to this “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” business.  The teachers are doing their best to trick the students into early iterations of algebra (although they’re still calling it math) and exercising their creative writing muscles with research papers and haiku. And they’re assigned homework that corresponds with all these new and improved intellectual pursuits.  Needless to say, things have gotten real.

Here’s just a snippit of our 5thgrade curriculum:

  • The American Revolution
  • The Bill of Rights (Quick – What’s the 7thAmendment?)
  • Identifying Types of Clouds
  • The Earth’s Structure
  • Polygons, Lines, and Angles (oh my!)
  • Geometry 
  • Acrostic and Cinquain Poems
  • Research and Citations

See what I mean?  This is all serious stuff!

What’s more is that the teachers trying to prepare the kids for the independence of middle school.  Gone are reminders about turning in assignments at the beginning of class and opportunities to revisit silly mistakes. We get fewer and fewer notices about homework and long-term projects, and if parents don’t pay close attention to the teachers’ correspondence, we could miss the one and only announcement you get about test dates.  Honestly, I think the teachers know that parents need almost as much training for junior high as our children do.

Most schools at all levels assign homework to reinforce knowledge presented classroom and, perhaps, encourage/force parents to get invested in their kids’ curriculum.  I’ll explore some of the research (ahem, controversy) behind homework in a future post.  Meantime, parents, sharpen your pencils — our kids are gaining on us!  Read what they read; study what they study. Test your own knowledge. You might just (re)learn something from your 5th grader and their homework.

I’d love to hear about your adventures in homework, Bon Mot Mamas!   

Homework Machine

By: Shel Silverstein

The Homework Machine, Oh the Homework Machine,
Most perfect contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is – “nine plus four” and the answer is “three.”
Three?
Oh me…
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

*In fairness, I frequently recount the Battle of Yorktown because, as my bon mot besties know, I’m a shameless Hamiltonfan.

Tales from the 5th Grade – Part I

Sometimes, when you have a tiny platform like this blog, you have to take the opportunity to reveal a slim glimpse into your real life.  To tell tales that might shed light on issues suffered by one or a few of the tens of Bon Mot readers.  To provide proof that the stories we recount about our not-so-little boy are as outlandish as you think.  To send a shout-out to the characters who shape our childhood – the teachers, neighbors, and friends.  And maybe to remind us all of what it was like to be ten again…  

This “Tales from the 5th Grade” series was inspired by the hilarity of our kid and the struggles unique to parenting an eleven-teen ager.  Our son’s journey through 5th grade has provided my husband and me more simultaneous challenges and joyful moments than we ever expected. Someone should have warned us that preparing for middle school requires serious effort and honing parenting skills we thought we had a few more years to sharpen.  This last elementary school lap has certainly tested our stamina.  Our race to attempt to navigate the need to promote his independence while limiting his exposure to the oh-no-you-didn’t moments is fraught with hurdles, and we didn’t adequately stretch for it.  Adolescence is a tricky thing, and 5th grade is proving to be the portal to all those things we dreaded about parenting older kids.  We were sort of shocked and a little offended when he learned to decode our s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g of things years ago, but now he understands our inside jokes.  He’s sharp as a tack and listens even when he pretends he’s not.  Moreover, there’s something to this ‘smarter than a fifth grader’ business.  We’re half-way through the school year, and we’ve conquered the Periodic Table, the American Revolution, and mathematical order of operations.  We’ll soon tackle early iterations of algebra (these kids are barely 11 years old) and the Civil War and this will ALL be on the test.  So consider this your warning, my friends.  They’re gaining on us – in maturity and intellect and wit.

Tales of the 5th  Grade Writer: This is How We ‘How To’

We recently embarked on a 5th grade class project that proved to be a learning experience for the entire family.  What started as a simple writing assignment ended up being a culinary adventure none of us saw coming.  Our son was tasked with crafting an instructional paper and, ultimately, making a ‘how to’ video.  His class was given only a few restrictions for this assignment – nothing to do with video games and nothing too simple.  That’s it. The kids chose lots of fun topics, and it was quite the conversation starter for fifth grade moms.  We were amused by the obviousness of some of the kids’ choices – dancers chose to teach others to twirl, artists chose to teach others how to sketch a particular object; you get the idea.  

So ask me what our precocious kid chose to write about for the assignment.  Keep in mind that his interests vary from art to soccer to playing the ukulele.  Yep, that’s right, he chose “How to make a French macaron!”  Now ask me if I’d ever made a French macaron before.  Nope, never.  It wasn’t as if I whipped up a delicious batch every Christmas for the family to enjoy with a warm cup of apple cider.  This ‘how to’ idea materialized seemingly from thin, well-whipped air. (Thank you, kids’ cooking shows…)  What honestly didn’t occur to me during our conversations early-on about the assignment was that we would actually eventually have to DO the how to.  The video and tasting parts of the assignment didn’t trickle home until we were already committed to making these delicate French pastries that take serious time and experimentation to perfect.  When asked why he chose this complicated endeavor for the assignment, our son simply replied, “I’ve always wanted to make French macarons, and I thought this was a good opportunity to learn.”  Plus, the recipe he found online during his search at school guaranteed “the perfect macarons every time.”  Well, who can argue with that?

In light of our 5th grader’s enthusiasm for his project despite the raw (under baked, you get it…) territory, we did the best thing you can in a situation like this — we learned while teaching.  And I began to appreciate the ambitious nature of our young chef.  He wasn’t deterred by the idea of making macarons so neither was I.  We lived to tell this 5th grade tale, and it was a tasty one. 

For those wondering, here’s how it turned out —

A few things to note:

  1. The YouTube video documents the first (literally THE first) time anyone in our family tried to make French Macarons.
  2. The second batch of macarons, the ones the students ate, looked and tasted much better than the first ones we made when shooting the video.  (They’re pictured above.)
  3. Yes, he actually broke the knob off of the stove trying to preheat.  I reminded him “push then turn” several times before we started recording.  We even practiced it, but it obviously wasn’t enough of a reminder and resulted in a VERY costly repair. Sigh.
  4. Truth be told, the thing that made me grumpiest about this whole exercise was that I had to go to Whole Foods, one of my least favorite places, to get almond flour.  Double sigh.
  5. Now that we’ve mastered the French macaron, I think we might put it in holiday recipe rotation.

“Careful cooking is love.” – Julia Child

Stay tuned for more Tales from the Fifth Grade…

Hey Bon Mot Mamas — I know I am not alone in recounting these zany tales! What are yours?