I have a love/hate relationship with homework. I love the fact that students get an opportunity to practice the skills they are working on at home, but I hate the battle that not turning homework can turn into. I also know as a parent that sometime very less than minimal effort goes into completing homework. So, what to do? What to do?
I am completely and totally sold on the Whole Brain Teaching Method, and not suprisingly they had an answer to my dilemma - The Universal Homework Method. You can watch the video below to hear Coach B explain it, and then I will explain what it is going to look like in my classroom.
Watch live streaming video from wholebrainteaching1 at livestream.com
In my classroom, we will begin Star Homework during the second week of school. They will receive the weekly form pictured below each Monday. They will complete their choice of homework each night. During morning meeting, I will briefly call out their names and will ask them to tell me how many stars they earned. We will briefly cheer and give a ten finger cheer to those students who complete two or three stars. We will then tally up the number of stars they have earned.
I will probably also use this as an extra math activity as well. For example, "Class, we had 42 stars yesterday, we earned 48 stars today, how many stars should be in our tally now?" "How many more stars did we earn today?" " How many stars do we need to earn to have 103 stars tomorrow?"
I was inspired by the weekly form at Third Grade Thoughts to create this Star Homework form. You can download it and modify it to suit your needs for free here.
