Projects piling up—what to do     047

A recent survey has found that schoolchildren aged 10-13 spend about four hours a week doing homework (Elissa Doherty, Homework load grows for Aussie kids, Daily Telegraph 19 Jul 2016, p. 3). A lot of this work is doing projects and research assignments, and this is what children complain about most. Quite often schools set these projects to be done over the school holidays, doing their best it seems to spoil the holidays for the children.

Why do we have all these projects?  Parents actually ask for them. They want children to have lots of homework so they can be kept busy working at school work all the time. Indeed if there are not a lot of projects being set some parents feel the school is not doing its job. I have covered this type of thing in a major blog post ‘Why parents should say no to some homework’.  In this post I want to deal with how parents can best help their children with projects rather than with issues of the appropriateness of the project, school parent communication and so on, which are covered in the major blog post.

The first principle is to know that the project has been set, what is involved, how it has to be done etc. Teachers communicate all this information to children, almost always in writing. Many children however ignore the information, and never bring it home until the last minute. So, train your child to bring things home immediately. If the project has three pieces of paper then three pieces must come home. An early start will make life easier for your child and you.

The second principle is to decide how much help your child needs in obtaining resources. Resources can come from everyday living, from the local library, the school library, or the Internet and so on. Ideally resources should be available in the school library and your child needs to check this information source first.

The third principle is making available the time necessary to complete the project, especially when there is more than one project to be done. Your child should be as involved as possible. Many children though have no sense of time at all and imagine that a date in three weeks’ time is in the never-never and will not eventuate. For most children then time management is an area where parents can make a positive difference.

The last, and perhaps the most important principle, is how much help you are going to give your child completing this project. The best approach is of course to give no help but few parents are willing to stand by and watch children struggle with tasks that can sometimes be quite beyond them. And that is how parents should decide things—what the child is able to do, and what is the child not able to do. The idea of parents giving help is to improve the child’s project skills.

Now one thing that can confound the whole project business is parents wanting the child to achieve a very high standard, and giving the child a very large amount of extra assistance. One might almost suppose that parents are competing with parents to have the best project, especially when projects might be displayed in the classroom or when special rewards are given by the teacher. Remember that your task as a parent needs to take a longer term approach. You are in the process of helping to educate a child, not achieving three stars when the project was really done by you. Too much help, and the wrong type of help is unethical, and over time this may erode your child’s moral values. Children may even come to expect, and demand, assistance with their work

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services