Education Communication

This is an example of a homework chart I made to help English learner parents support their children’s learning process–specifically, to understand weekly expectations in connection with classroom studies. This was in my son’s first grade class, where they received a homework folder every Monday with the work they’d be doing at home or in the after school program for that week.

At first, when we got the letter at the beginning of the year explaining this, it seemed like a lot (especially because on Thursday a “Communication Folder” was added to the Homework Folder), but we found that when I mapped it out in a chart, it was super simple because each day of the week was the same assignment, just different pages of work.

This ended up being less stressful for the students than getting different homework handed out each day, because with the chart I could communicate to the parents how to explain ‘goals’ vs ‘deadlines’, and they had a reliable reference in pictures.

I originally made this for my friend Naima, but when Sara (her daughter, my son’s classmate) got it out to work from in their after school program, the other kids came over and said, “Oooh what’s that?” because it was kind of like a homework comic book. Then many of them asked eagerly if they could have one also, so I made copies and gave them to each student in the class and also their parents.

These ended up on a lot of refrigerator doors at home, which was super fun to see.