homework in kinder

How To Create Kindergarten Homework That Parents And Kids Will Love

Kindergarten homework is not developmentally appropriate.  There I said it.  Five-year-olds are not meant to sit down to do paper and pencil tasks about reading and writing.  Somewhere along the way, someone who was most definitely not a kindergarten teacher decided that five and six-year-olds MUST read by the end of kindergarten. 

This created unrealistic expectations of teachers to somehow overcome brain science and teach students how to read.  Teachers began assigning sight word homework in addition to leveled readers and math worksheets.  Suddenly, kindergarten kids have as much homework as older elementary students.  Yet, there are no studies to support the notion that homework in kindergarten helps kids to achieve more. 

Some teachers have stopped assigning homework altogether but others are required to assign kindergarten homework.  Read on to find developmentally appropriate ways to assign kindergarten homework that parents will love.

Teachers Under Pressure

The pressure put on teachers to have all kindergarten students meet the same high academic standards at the same time is completely unrealistic.  Then that pressure was transferred to teachers who decided that in order to achieve this goal, they needed to share the responsibility with parents.  Then parents decided that they need  kindergarten homework to help them to achieve this goal.

This notion isn't all bad.   Sharing learning responsibilities with families is a productive way to help students achieve and giving parents activities and skills to practice at home is certainly helpful.   The problem is that we've lost sight of what we know is natural child development.   

So what can teachers do to help their young students to practice skills at home but still allow them to be kids?  We can start by giving students a variety of homework options rather than requirements.  In distance learning or remote learning situations, teachers are under even more pressure!  Check out this page for some distance learning types for Kindergarten teachers. 

Keep Homework Fun!

Kids work hard all day (or for half the day) at school.  They don't need to go home to sit with worksheets and pencils to continue to practice sight words (which the latest brain research doesn't support anyway, but that's a blog post for another day). 

In school, we know that all kids have different learning styles so we need to remember this when assigning homework.   Sending the same worksheet with each student is not differentiating.  You can differentiate homework by giving students options and allowing families to choose the activities that are the best fit for their students.

Keep “assignments” fun and engaging with a variety of ways to practice important foundational skills.  Think about how you design engaging centers and apply that to homework.  Practice writing letters and numbers in sand, finger paint or shaving cream!  Create math problems with toys or breakfast cereal.  Play games with dice to develop number sense and social skills like taking turns.  There are so many fun possibilities!

Give Families Homework Options!

Think about your academic goals for the week or the month.  Then create a list of 15 – 20 choices full of skills you want your students to practice.  This can be a list, a chart, or even a calendar!  You can send this list home to give families options and give kids some choice in their assignments. 

You can choose to include only academic tasks but I like to include some more developmentally appropriate skills that are often overlooked.  Skills like memorizing phone numbers and addresses are important things kids do not often do anymore.  You can add life skills like practice playing games (winning and losing with grace), tying shoes, helping to fold laundry and more.

I try to limit paper-pencil options.  However, when I do include them, I try to keep them open-ended.  For example, instead of practicing writing letters with a pencil, encourage students to write letters in sand or pudding.  If you want kids to practice writing, give them fun writing prompts or open-ended options.  For math practice, instead of doing a page of addition problems, have students tell and solve their own addition story problems using their favorite toys.  There are a lot of easy, no extra materials needed ways to practice these skills that won't stress kindergarten kids or parents.

Need to know more about assigning Kindergarten Homework?

How Do You Find the Time to Revamp Homework?

Time is one of the biggest challenges any teacher faces.  Finding time to rework your kindergarten homework assignments is difficult.  I can help!  Sign up for my e-mail list here and I will send you a completely free, editable homework menu to try in your classroom!  If you don't have time to create your own, I have monthly homework menus in my TPT store.  You can check them out here. 

I am hopeful that the pendulum is swinging back to more developmentally appropriate practices in kindergarten.  I'm happy to see that many districts across the country are returning to play-based learning in kindergarten.  This gives me hope!  In the meantime, let's try some new homework options for our youngest students.  What other suggestions do you have for homework in kindergarten?  I'd love to hear them!

One Comment

Your first statement in the last paragraph says it all! I have been making some noise about developmentally appropriate practices for years. We are beginning our school year with testing, testing, testing! I will be teaching students face to face and online at the same time. I have no idea where to start so I decided to do some research and found your site. I'm liking what I'm seeing so far. Please keep up the good work!!

Comments are closed.

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Home » Kindergarten Homework – First Quarter

Kindergarten Homework – First Quarter

• free printable , Back to School , Management , Family Involvement

Are you ready to start your year with organized and efficient homework for your kindergarten students?  We have you covered with a free kindergarten homework week!  Tired of pulling things together at the last minute and feel like it’s boring and not meaningful?  Simply Kinder has you covered with our Kindergarten Homework with Weekly Family Games!   Keep reading and learn how to get your first week free.

THIS ACTIVITY WORKS WELL WITH

Here is information all about our First Quarter Kindergarten Homework .  Included in this set is 8 weeks of homework and it’s EDITABLE if you open it in Adobe. It comes in traditional print and D’Nealian.  Easily pull each week’s homework, print, and put into your student’s folders.

Each week comes with a cover page that has a reading log and some sort of daily skills practice. This is great because it helps the family to work with some of these skills that we don’t really teach but are important for the kids to know.  The skills will progress over the year to include phone numbers, initials, etc, but this first unit includes:

Each week also has two pages of academic review.  This can easily be copied back to back to save paper.  It is separated into days (Monday through Thursday but you can change them if you use the editable version) and each day has three skills to review.  These skills also scaffold throughout the quarter; for example, we start with simple sounds and towards the end of the quarter the students start working with CVC words.  Academic concepts this quarter include:

• tracing & drawing shapes
• identifying shapes in the environment
• rhyming words
• identifying the number of objects
• writing lowercase letters
• differentiating upper and lowercase letters
• reading letter names/sounds
• identifying and writing initial sounds
• writing simple CVC words
• number of sounds in words (phoneme segmentation)
• counting objects and writing the number
• writing numbers to 10
• writing missing numbers

And the best part is the family games.  Each week comes with a print-and-play game.  These are usually two pages.  The students (or family) will color the pieces, cut them out, and play the game.  Each game comes with directions and a label.  Slide these games into a baggie or envelop with the label on the outside to build up a bank of games for the students to play all year!  Your parents will RAVE about this component to the homework!  Fourth quarter’s games include:

• Pencil ABC Match (part 1)
• Pencil ABC Match (Part 2)
• Star Number Puzzles
• Initial Sound Apple Sorts
• Delicious Apple Rhymes
• Environmental Shape Sorting Mat Game
• 1-10 Number Puzzles
• I Can Read Tic-Tac-Toe

Enter your email below and I will send you one week of First Quarter Kindergarten Homework  sent right to your inbox now.  And if you already love it and want to save big on the full year set, click here to get take advantage of our half-off homework deal today!

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To read more about our homework AND see what is included in the other quarters, click here .

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Kindergarten Homework: Is It Appropriate?

• April 11, 2015

Homework has become somewhat of a hot topic lately. I’ve read articles about schools adopting no-homework policies. I’ve seen research on the ineffectiveness of homework. I’ve found infographics on the absence of homework in other successful nations.

All of this has made me question whether or not my students should have homework. I’m a reading specialist, so I don’t assign homework in my current position. But as a Kindergarten teacher, I did give out a very brief weekly homework packet. Was it a waste of my time? Did I damage my students’ learning or home lives? Should Kindergarteners have homework at all?

I believe that Kindergarteners  can benefit from a very small, purposeful amount of simple homework. No, I don’t mean 5 meaningless worksheets a night. No, I don’t mean elaborate projects that their parents end up doing. But I do feel that a very small amount of Kindergarten homework can be valuable, particularly when the homework is reading . And here’s why:

• Homework is an opportunity for parents to show kids that they value education.  When a parent (or other family member) sits down with a child to work on homework, that adult figure is telling the child, “Hey, this is important. This is something I value.”
• Homework can give parents an idea of what students are working on in class.  Kindergarten was a long time ago for many parents! Kindergarten expectations have also changed greatly over the years. By assigning meaningful homework that is relevant to what is going on in class, we can give parents a window into their children’s daily lives and learning.
• Homework can provide students with additional practice and repetition.  I don’t know about you, but my Kinders sure need a lot of repetition to master concepts! Having my students spend 5-10 minutes practicing something outside of school is an opportunity to get in some of that extra practice.
• Homework can send kids the message that learning needn’t be restricted to school.  When you assign kids meaningful homework that encourages them to interact with their families and home environment, this sends the message that learning happens  everywhere – not just at school. Here’s an example of a simple homework task that sends this message:  “Find 4 things in your house that start with the letter g. Draw them on this paper.”

What Appropriate Kindergarten Homework Looks Like

Okay, so what kind of homework is appropriate for Kindergarten? Here are some suggestions for designing positive homework experiences:

• Emphasize reading.  It’s so valuable for kids to spend time reading with their parents. Maybe for homework you request that parents read with their children for 10 minutes a night – and that’s it!
• Give assignments that are SUPER brief!  Kindergarteners’ attention spans are short. So their homework should be short, too! If I send home a task, I try for something that can be completed in about 5-10 minutes. If you do send home a small weekly homework packet, make sure to educate parents about the importance of doing some each night (rather than all of it on Thursday night!). Check in periodically with students and parents to make sure that the homework isn’t taking too long. (And don’t feel like you “have to” give homework every day…many kids have a long day at school already.)
• Provide tasks that are meaningful.  An assignment like “Find 4 things in your house that start with the letter g. Draw them on this paper” is more fun and engaging than a worksheet on the letter g! When possible, involve family members in completing the homework. Games and scavenger hunts can get everyone in the family involved!
• Assign tasks at the right difficulty level. Why assign homework at all if it’s way too easy or way too hard? It may take a little time, but giving students slightly different homework can help maximize its effectiveness.
• Create a “homework bag” to provide necessary materials. If you think that students may not have pencils or crayons at home, why not send a few home with the homework? Also, reading with an adult makes for a wonderful homework assignment, but make sure to send home books. Many families do not have access to books in the home.

Challenges of Assigning Kindergarten Homework

In theory, the suggestions above can be relatively easy to implement. But it’s never quite that easy, is it? Here are some of the challenges that I (and my colleagues) have encountered when assigning homework to our students:

• Not all students have parent or family support to complete homework. I believe strongly in educating parents during Open House and other school events about the importance of devoting home time to learning. However, some parents are still not able to help students with homework for a variety of reasons (language barrier, time, education, etc.).
• Finding or creating differentiated homework assignments is very time consuming.   I always have a huge range of abilities in my classroom, and I want to provide homework assignments at my students’ individual levels. I don’t want students to become frustrated by the homework, or completely bored by it. But differentiating homework takes a TON of time!
• Keeping up with missing assignments can be challenging.  Kids don’t always turn in their homework. I can’t tell you how many times I inquired about a missing homework assignment, only to find out that it had been in the child’s backpack for a week! Kids also don’t always do their homework. Trying to track down missing assignments can take up a lot of time.

Conclusions

In spite of these challenges, I still believe that a small amount of homework or time spent reading with parents can be very valuable for Kindergarteners. Because I know firsthand how time-consuming it can be to find the right homework for students, I’ve created a Leveled Literacy Homework series that you can use with your Kindergarten (or 1st grade) students.

The idea behind the series is to give you materials that are engaging and meaningful (like family games), can be used to differentiate your homework assignments, and are ideal for students who either do or do not have family help with completing their homework.

All activities (except for simple worksheets) come with parent instructions in English and Spanish. They also have links to optional videos that parents can choose to watch to learn how to read with their child or play the literacy games together. To learn more about the series, click on the image below.

What do you like to use for homework in your Kindergarten classroom?

Related Posts:

Good information

…i love the information😘😘

Can you specify the age of the child i can apply these techniques upon??

Hi Diana, this article is mostly about 5-6 year old children.

[…] specialist (and former kindergarten teacher) Alison at Learning at the Primary Pond advocates for a small amount of meaningful homework in elementary school, even for kindergarteners, […]

Being the mum of a kindergartener, single mother infact, that works full time shift work and 2 hrs away from any family or friends, I genuinely disagree with homework at this age. I have enough to juggle let alone adding an hour into an already stretched out day, where my son has been at school and then oosh all day, to argue about him not wanting to do homework and IF he sits long enough to attempt the homework.. it strains our relationship. There is no one else around to help with homework, there is always copious amounts of homework …  Read more »

All great points you bring up – thanks for sharing!

We’ll Said. I found the reasoning above to be so thin and void of true reasons for having a 5-year old do homework. They’ll have so many more years to learn homework and the value of education. We send our kids to school for 8 hours a day, I’m sure they’ll understand someday that we as parents value education. I don’t need to do a silly exercise with them to get that point across.

I’m Alison, a literacy specialist. I love getting kids excited about reading and writing – and sharing teaching ideas with other teachers!

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Homework in Preschool and Kindergarten

Homework from vanessa on Vimeo .

Preschool Homework

To do or not to do, that is the question! The topic of homework for young children is one that is fiercely debated in the field of early childhood education. Many parents and administrators are all for it, many teachers are against it.

Some schools mandate homework for Pre-K because they think it’s going to close the achievement gap, others do it because they think parents “expect it” and still others assign homework because it’s what they’ve always done. There’s a little something here for everyone, no matter what your situation.

Different types of homework has been shown to benefit different populations. The type of program you work in may also dictate the type of homework you send home, if any.

Parents and Homework

My goal for homework in my own classroom is to support and encourage parents as partners in their child’s education. It is my responsibility as the teacher to teach the required skills, but it is the parent’s job to help support me in my efforts. In other words, “It takes a village…” Some parents need more help and encouragement than others, it is also my job to offer that help and encouragement to those who need it.

Reading Aloud to Children as Homework

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic I encourage you to check out the online book study I hosted for The Read-Aloud Handbook .

Meaningful Homework Activities for Parents to Do With Children

The book Just Right Homework Activities for Pre-K offers many meaningful activities that parents can do at home with their children. It includes detailed instructions for parents for each activity as well as blackline masters.

Structured Homework

When working with Title 1 and programs that serve at-risk populations it may be necessary to provide parent training through educational sessions. All parents want to help their children, but not all parents know how to do so.

I created the video at the top of this page to show to parents at our “Homework Help” educational session.

Printable Personalized Practice Cards

With just one click of a button in ESGI , you can quickly generate parent letters for each child in your class along with corresponding flash cards, specifically aligned to each child’s individual needs.

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In the beginning, some components of a structured homework program might include:

• First Name Identification & Writing Practice
• Number Identification and Counting
• Color Recognition- for those that need it
• Shape Recognition-for those that need it
• Letter Recognition
• Books for parents to read aloud to their child (See my take-home book program )

As young children mature and their needs change some changes to the homework may be necessary, such as:

• Last Name Identification & Writing Practice
• Sight Words (for those who are ready)
• Number identification, 20 and up
• Rhyming and other phonemic awareness skills
• Letter sounds

Of course, differentiation for students performing above or below grade level expectations should always be taken into consideration when assigning homework.

How Do I Get Started Setting Up a Homework Program?

Step 1 : Prepare your materials. Prepare the following materials to give to each child.

• Name Card and Letter Tiles : Prepare a name card for every student using ABC Print Arrow font (see resources section) then print on cardstock and laminate. You could also use a sentence strip and a permanent to create name cards. You can use letter tiles from Wal-Mart or Staples or you can cut a matching sentence strip apart between the letters to make the name puzzle.

• Number Flash Cards: You can use a simple font to type the numbers into a document in Word, print, laminate, cut, hole punch, and put on rings. The rings are highly recommended so the cards don’t become lost. You can also find free, printable number flash cards on-line.

• Letter Flash Cards: The letter flash cards at left were made in Word using the ABC Print font, just print, laminate, cut, hole punch, and put on rings. Don’t forget to make one set of upper and one set of lowercase. The rings are highly recommended so the cards don’t become lost.

• Color Flash Cards: The color flash cards pictured above were made by placing color stickers on paper. You can also find free, printable color flash cards on-line. The rings are highly recommended so the cards don’t become lost.
• Shape Flash Cards: You can also find free, printable shape flash cards on-line. Just print, laminate, cut, hole punch, and put on rings.

Step 2: Next, you will need to create a system to communicate what activities you expect your students to do each night. One of the most effective ways to do this is by creating a monthly “Homework Calendar.”

You can get free calendars online that you can customize to meet your needs. In each space on the calendar indicate which activities you want parents to focus on each night, this helps parents from becoming overwhelmed. At the bottom of each space on the calendar there is a place for parents to sign indicating they have helped their child complete the assigned tasks. You can mark each space with a stamp or sticker to indicate your acknowledgement of homework completion. The homework calendars are kept in our BEAR books and carried back and forth by the child each day in his or her backpack.

If this method is too much for you then you may prefer the simpler Reading Log method .

Step 3: To implement a successful Pre-K Homework Program in your classroom you must meet with all the parents to explain your program. Do not expect your program to be successful without this critical component. Have an informational meeting or “Parent Night” and send home flyers to invite the parents. Make sure to include this event in your weekly newsletter as well.

When having parent education sessions such as this it is best to have some sort of prior arrangements made for the students and siblings to be outside of the classroom in an alternate location so the parents can focus on the information that is being presented.

• After parents have arrived and you have welcomed them and thanked them for attending, show them the homework video (see top of page).
• Next, use your document camera to show them the actual materials they will be receiving. Model how to use the materials and how to do each activity they were shown in the video.
• Show them a sample homework calendar and what to do with it.
• Explain your system for sending materials home in detail, for example will materials be sent home in a bag or a folder?
• Make sure parents thoroughly understand the purpose and expectations for your homework program as well as your system.
• Allow parents to ask questions and thank them again for attending.

You could also create a video like the one at the top of this page to show to parents.

Additional Information:

• Homework should last no more than 5-10 minutes total each night including the book that parents read to their child.
• Worksheets should never be sent home as homework. This sends the message to parents that worksheets are an acceptable form of “work” and it is a good teaching practice when the exact opposite is true.
• Homework at this age should be fun and children should enjoy doing it. Advise parents that if their child does not seem to enjoy homework time they should make an appointment to see you so you can help them determine what is wrong and how to make it fun.
• Emphasize that reading to their children every day is the single most important thing they can do as parents. It is also highly recommended that you show the parents one of the following short video clips about the importance of reading to their children:

How to Help Your Child Read (English) How to Read Out Loud to Your Preschooler (English) Como ayudar a tu hijo leer (Spanish)

Homework Links

• Homework Tip Sheet
• Name homework explanation
• Ways to Help Your Child Learn the Alphabet at Home
• Supporting Math Skills at Home

More Teaching Tips from Pre-K Pages

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Kindergarten Homework: Too Much Too Early?

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Kindergarten has taken some getting used to for Walker Sheppard, who didn’t attend preschool or day care. Besides all the new rules to remember, there’s a new nightly routine: homework.

“We spend anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour on it,” said Michael Sheppard, Walker’s dad.

When the 5-year-old comes home every day, Sheppard said, his son is tired and not ready to sit down and figure out his assignments.

“He doesn’t like it,” said Sheppard, who lives in Pulaski, Va. “The first week he went to school he asked us why he was having to do schoolwork at home.”

That’s a question a lot of parents are asking, especially when it comes to the youngest pupils. Studies by researchers including Harris Cooper, a Duke University psychology and neuroscience professor who wrote The Battle Over Homework , have consistently shown that homework has minimal academic benefits for children in the early-elementary years.

Instead, both the National Education Association and the National PTA endorse Cooper’s so-called 10-minute rule, which calls for roughly 10 minutes of homework a night per grade level beginning in 1st grade. So children in 2nd grade would have 20 minutes, those in 3rd grade would have 30 minutes, and so on. In high school, students may exceed that recommendation depending on the difficulty of the courses they choose.

Split Opinions

Those guidelines don’t even mention kindergarten. But that’s not stopping educators in many places from assigning homework.

Delilah Orti said that every Monday her daughter, Mia, a kindergartner last year in the Miami-Dade Public Schools system in Florida, received a homework packet with about 25 worksheets that were due at the end of that week.

Orti said the packet included work on phonics, spelling, reading comprehension, and social studies. She describes her daughter as a quick learner who was already reading in kindergarten but still needed her help with word problems and science worksheets.

“She could read the words, but she had no idea what they meant,” said Orti.

Orti said Mia spent 30 minutes reading every night and an hour on the packet.

“I felt that it was inappropriate for that age,” said Orti. “What she was getting for homework was more busywork. I don’t think she was getting anything out of it and I think it was way too much.”

But such concerns aren’t shared by administrators or parents at Arlington Traditional School, a countywide elementary school in Arlington, Va., with a waiting list of parents eager for their children to attend.

Kindergartners there are expected to do 30 minutes of homework a night, Monday through Thursday.

Every student at the school is expected to spend 15 minutes reading a night. For kindergartners who can’t read yet, that means their parents are expected to read to them. The other 15 minutes is spent doing things like dictating a story to their parents using words that start with a sound they’ve been learning in class or exercises that involve circling that letter.

“We feel that this is a connection that we want with parents,” said Holly Hawthorne, the school’s principal. “We want them to know what their children are learning at school, we want them to know how they’re doing in school, if the work is too hard, if it’s too easy, we want them to be able to support what the kids are learning at school at home as well.”

Eliminating Packets

Still, some kindergarten teachers remain firm in their opposition to mandatory homework.

Barbara Knapp used to assign her kindergarten pupils at Bradley Elementary School in Corralitos, Calif., weekly homework packets. But that all changed 10 years ago during the Great Recession.

“Teachers were only given two reams of paper a month at my school, so we were forced to cut back,” said Knapp.

She and some of her colleagues at the school located about 90 miles south of San Francisco decided a good way to do that would be to eliminate those homework packets. During that time, she said, she started to research homework and found the case against it for young elementary pupils very compelling.

“The research showed that there was no correlation between school success and the traditional paper-pencil homework in kindergarten,” said Knapp, who has 19 years of classroom-teaching experience.

When she was assigning homework, Knapp said parents sometimes complained that it was frustrating for their children. Other times, it was obvious the parents had done the work rather than the child.

Now, Knapp only assigns nightly reading of her pupils’ choice, a move that she credits with making them better readers. She adds that she hasn’t seen any deterioration in other skills since she eliminated traditional homework, and she’s been able to spend more time on lesson preparation rather than grading homework.

“It’s been great not having to focus on homework,” said Knapp. “Putting together the packet, running them all off, grading them all, it was a huge amount of time that was being taken instead of us planning really wonderful, rich, in-class lessons. Homework took away a lot of planning time for just a bunch of busywork.”

Risk of ‘Busywork’ vs. Parental Bonding

Cathy Vatterott is no fan of busywork at any grade level and doesn’t think homework should be part of kindergarten. She’s a professor of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the author of Rethinking Homework . “There’s enough of an adjustment for young children in kindergarten without throwing in homework,” said Vatterott.

And she worries that adjusting to school routines combined with homework could turn off young students to learning.

“I want to make sure that they don’t hate school,” said Vatterott, who noted that young children learn best through play.

She also points to a 2016 University of Virginia study, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” which found that kindergarten in 2010 was more like the 1st grade of the late 1990s. Vatterott says she’s concerned that children who aren’t developmentally ready for this work might “internalize that they’re not smart or that they’re not good at school.”

But keeping the bond strong between home and school is one of the reasons that Duke researcher Cooper doesn’t mind homework for pupils in kindergarten, with a few caveats.

“The assignments need to be short, simple, and lead to success,” said Cooper. “We don’t want young children to get frustrated with homework. We don’t want them to get bored, and we don’t want them to begin thinking that schoolwork is too difficult for them so that they begin to develop a self-image of not being a good student.”

Finding a Balance

Some kindergarten teachers are embracing short, unique assignments for their pupils that don’t involve worksheets.

Shannon Brescher Shea’s son’s kindergarten teacher provides a list of activities the children can do at home if they choose. The activities ask them, for instance, to draw a picture of what they did over the weekend or collect and count a handful of leaves by ones.

Shea says after visiting her son’s classroom in suburban Rockville, Md., and seeing how much work he does, she’s even more against the idea of mandatory homework for children in kindergarten.

“They are going through so much energy and so much focus at school already and exerting so much self-control that to then have these kids come home and do homework on top of that is a recipe for them not wanting to go to school and not enjoying learning,” said Shea.

Jennifer Craven’s daughter is also in kindergarten this year, and she said so far the young girl has been asked to “practice tying shoes, practice writing her name, and read two books each night.”

Craven, who lives in Meadville, Pa., a city about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, said her family would be doing these activities anyway, and for now, her daughter thinks homework is fun.

“I think this is very age appropriate and I don’t mind the use of the term ‘homework’ at this age, as they will realize what real homework is soon enough,” said Craven.

Michael Sheppard talked to his son’s teacher in Pulaski about the homework she assigns. He said the 30-year classroom veteran acted like it was out of her hands.

Sheppard, 42, who attended school in the same district as his son, Walker, said he didn’t have to deal with homework until well after kindergarten.

“Maybe there should be homework,” said Sheppard. “I just think it would be better starting at 3rd grade.”

A version of this article appeared in the November 28, 2018 edition of Education Week as Kindergarten Homework Debate: Too Much Too Soon?

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/r/Parenting is the place to discuss the ins and out as well as ups and downs of child-rearing. From the early stages of pregnancy to when your teenagers are finally ready to leave the nest (even if they don't want to) we're here to help you through this crazy thing called parenting. You can get advice on potty training, talk about breastfeeding, discuss how to get your baby to sleep or ask if that one weird thing your kid does is normal.

Homework For Kindergarten

I was just wondering if everyone's kids had homework every day in kindergarten. I don't really have an issue with homework, however I don't understand why my 6 year old needs it every day on top of 7 hours of school. And it's worksheets and sentences, etc, on top of whatever he didn't finish in class. Not just light reading or whatever. Some family members with kids a little older than our son have said it's insane. He's my first and only child, so I don't really know the drill. Did anyone else's kids have a similar experience at this age?

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Where Kamala Harris Stands on the Issues: Abortion, Immigration and More

She wants to protect the right to abortion nationally. Here’s what else to know about her positions.

• Share full article

By Maggie Astor

• Published July 21, 2024 Updated Aug. 23, 2024

With Vice President Kamala Harris poised to replace President Biden on the Democratic ticket, her stances on key issues will be scrutinized by both parties and the nation’s voters.

She has a long record in politics: as district attorney of San Francisco, as attorney general of California, as a senator, as a presidential candidate and as vice president.

Here is an overview of where she stands.

Ms. Harris supports legislation that would protect the right to abortion nationally, as Roe v. Wade did before it was overturned in 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

After the Dobbs ruling, she became central to the Biden campaign’s efforts to keep the spotlight on abortion, given that Mr. Biden — with his personal discomfort with abortion and his support for restrictions earlier in his career — was a flawed messenger. In March, she made what was believed to be the first official visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice president.

She consistently supported abortion rights during her time in the Senate, including cosponsoring legislation that would have banned common state-level restrictions, like requiring doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admitting privileges in order to provide abortions.

As a presidential candidate in 2019, she argued that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to what is known as pre-clearance for new abortion laws — those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. That proposal is not viable now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe.

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