Homework Notebook

Middle School Years: Achieving the Best Education for Your Child, Grades 5-8
by Michele A. Hernandez

(Page 2 of 3)

There is one item so valuable that I will discuss it here in greater detail than I do in Appendix B, and that is the homework notebook. There is no general agreement as to whether the homework notebook should be a little tiny notepad, a calendar-sized daily planner, or a full-sized notebook, but I do think it should be its own separate entity and not simply a section of the three-ring binder. I say this because the three-ring binder is a big, clunky item that no child is going to want to take out of his bookbag if he doesn't have to. Imagine: The class is just ending, your child has already put his big notebook away, but suddenly the teacher says, “Whoops, I almost forgot-be sure to do exercises one through ten in your grammar book.” If it's a choice of dragging out the binder or just saying to himself “Oh, I'll remember …” (which has an almost zero probability), he will probably opt for the latter. On the other hand, if your child has a smaller and more easily accessible notebook, he is much more likely simply to pull it out of his backpack and copy down the homework assignment.

At least while your child is a sixth- and seventh-grader, I would recommend organizing the notebook with him (not for him) so that you train him well and leave him with a lifetime of good study skills and habits. Before school starts, suggest that your child design a chart for each week of the first few months of school. This chart can be formatted in any number of ways, but you want to be sure to have the dates and days of the week in the left column with a few spaces between each one, and a place for all five subjects across the top. If the notebook is shaped like a rectangle, have your child use the short side for the days and dates and the long side for the subjects. A sample notebook might look like this:

	Math	Lang. Arts	Spanish	Social Studies	Science
Monday 9/1 Books Needed:
Tuesday 9/2 Books:
Wed. 9/3 Books:
Thurs. 9/4 Books:
Friday 9/5 Books:

Once you have taken the time to set up this notebook with your child, the important part of the routine is to check it every day for the first week of school to make sure that your child is in fact writing down every assignment. After that week, tell your child in a nice way that you reserve the right to check his homework notebook at any time.

I think the hardest statement for parents to deal with is “But Mom, I don't have any homework.” To get around this fabrication, I would require that your child fill out the whole chart every day. If there is no homework for a certain class, you should have him write in “No homework” rather than just leaving the space blank. That way you can at least check with a particular teacher if you see a pattern of not writing down the homework.

A major advantage of a calendar-style planner (available at stationery stores, or any office-supply store like Office Max, Staples, or Office Depot) is the ability to “log in” the future due dates of long-range assignments, term papers, exam dates, et cetera.

Although setting up a homework notebook seems simple, I can almost guarantee that children who get into the habit of keeping close track of all assignments early on will be much more successful students than those who rely on memory or on asking other students in the class.

With technology becoming even more accessible in classrooms across the country, some schools have Web pages that can be accessed at home and at school so teachers can post their nightly homework for all to see. If your school does this, it is a great backup method to compare your child's written homework notebook with the Web syllabus so you can have the most updated information.

You need to impress upon your child the importance of taking a minute toward the end of the school day to look at the night's homework assignments so he can figure out which books he will need to bring home. In fact, it is a very good idea, at least in the younger grades, to have your child add a column to the homework pad that reads “Books needed” so that he can quickly scan down and figure out that he can't do his math homework without the math textbook, for example. Although it sounds painfully obvious, anyone who has had kids or dealt with students on a daily basis knows that one of the most common excuses for not being able to do homework is “Oh, I can't do my reading because I left the book in school.”

At the very least, students need to bring home all notebooks (the three-ring binder, the homework notebook, plus math or any other subject that has one) and then the appropriate textbooks. Finally, you might want to make it a rule that loose pieces of paper have no place in the backpack since they only get ripped to shreds or lost. At least while your children are young, you may want to check their backpacks every few days to make sure there is some order and neatness. No need to nag them; just let them know you reserve the right to check their backpack periodically. Insist that once homework assignments are completed, they must be clipped back into the binder or, in the case of a spiral notebook, into a folder for that subject so that they are not floating around in the backpack.

One further note about going through your child's backpack: By the time a child is in sixth grade, he has the right of privacy. Therefore you should assure your child that you will not read personal notes from his friends or go through his notebook page by page.

Copyright © 2000 by by Michele A. Hernández

About the Author

Michele A. Hernandez is a native of New York City, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1989. She earned a master's degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. For the last four years, she has been assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College.