Home Learning

We have explored 'Home Learning' projects as an alternative to Homework.  Changing the title changes the emphasis.  I like the fact that we promote to children and families that learning takes place everywhere, all of the time and that families can have foci to learn and play together.

Many of our Home Learning projects have been very successful with high levels of pupil engagement and buy in.  The most successful projects involve the whole family.  They are open-ended.  They can be developed over a series of weeks.

These Year 2 children created circuits as part of their Home Learning on electricity.  They then taught the rest of the class about what they'd done, how they'd done it and how the circuit worked.  This changed the nature of the relationship between the teacher and the taught.  It empowered the children and led to a deepened learning for all... that came from curiosity, rather than their passive reception of an imposed curriculum.  It changed the teacher's role and enabled much more scientific thought and theorising.

Why would we choose not to teach in this way?

Home Learning topics mirror the topics that make up the curriculum.  Home Learning runs alongside, and in some cases ahead of, the topics themselves.  Pupils may, for instance, be asked during a school holiday to find out all they can about the Vikings, or the Second World War, or their family, or research a subject that they want to continue to study in school during that Half Term.

The topic in school then begins with a sharing of the things that the children have found out.  This is usually includes a great deal of factual content.   The fruits of the children's research is mapped onto large sheets of paper that are displayed in the classroom.  The pupils-as-researchers, then, have created the factual skeleton for the topic.  The teacher has not had to 'teach' the facts (by which I mean take the didactic knowledge transmission approach).  This enables topics to focus on skills development, and on exciting hooks into the learning, eg; a Second World War topic that begins with pupils walking into a blacked-out classroom.  As soon as they enter, the Air Raid siren sounds and the teacher shouts at the children to take cover under the desks.  The teacher, then, begins teaching in a whisper with everyone huddled beneath the desks. 
Why are we here?
What's going on outside?
How much danger are we in?
What would happen if we turned on the lights?
The topic thus takes on a real and meaningful life for the children.  They are able to empathise, understand, respond.  Surely children learn more, learn better, learn deeper if they have an emotional hook into the topic that is being taught.