Thursday 11 June 2009

Once more unto the homework breach dear friends, once more

For the unexpected week off J is again drowning in homework, but this time it’s school based.

He is reading a book in German which seems to be based on the Titanic story. He has to finish it by 5th July, and he has 8 weeks to read it from start to finish. It’s 150 pages long, and at the end of each reading session he has to write a sentence explaining what has happened – an aide memoire to help discussion in class. We work out that he needs to do 5 pages per day to get through the book and give himself the weekends etc off. He slowly works through it, and finishes a month ahead of schedule. Result. In fact, astonishing result.

He also has been set the task of learning a whole load of German vocabulary, articles and meanings, on an ongoing basis. This is tough. He’s only 10, can’t we cut him a bit of slack ? But I realize that it might also help us in our learning. After a great deal of argy-bargy and then a little mutual co-operation we agree a strategy based on rote learning (ie writing out the words with their articles 3-5 times per word) and then me continuously testing him on it. We’re in the early stages, but it seems to be working, and his German marks are improving.

He’s also doing a new (improved ?!) and advanced form of Kopfrechnen, which also requires parental help. This involves me saying to him eg “one metre two decimetres times six” and he has to give me the answer (seven metres two decimeters) etc. It’s tricky stuff but you can see that it’s really making his brain work in a very logical, step by step way. I like Swiss maths. At least at this level. There’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to help him in a year’s time ;-)

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