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After-school Homework

Éco-lita Trilingue offers homework assistance and supervision between 3:30 and 4:00pm for students from grade 1 to grade 6. Unless a student needs or wants to work on or prepare for a project at home, we do not encourage students to bring any work at home until they are in cycle 3 or in middle school.

After being in school from 8:30am until 4pm, students need to go home, play outside, and spend time with their families and friends. We never expect parents to be teachers; if your child does not understand something, then the teacher should be informed so that she can explain it to your child in a different way.

Furthermore, homework often causes a stressful atmosphere in the home when we know from scientific research that stress causes short-term memory loss. When a child is stressed, he cannot lay down a new memory or access already existing memories. This means that he cannot think clearly or learn! (www.fi.edu/learn/brain/stress.html#stressmemory) Since the prefrontal cortex (the thinking brain) is inaccessible when a person is stressed, then asking children to do homework during this time is setting them up for failure and frustration. Homework time then becomes a war zone, and the child and the parents lose. All aspects of learning need to be enjoyable, not a time of conflict or a fight for survival!

In addition to the research done on the brain, Alfie Kohn, author of
The Homework Myth, states that “There is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how they do it) and any meaningful measure of achievement.”

Once the students start getting homework, then we ask the parents to be present and offer their support and understanding. Never jeopardize the strong, loving, and safe relationship you have with your child over homework issues. It will only create a vicious cycle of yelling, frustration, stress, and the inability to think. For ideas on “Stress-Free Homework”, please visit our school portal.