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Interesting ideas for primary homework

• Author: Kevin Harcombe
• Main Subject: CPD
• Subject: Leadership
• Date Posted: 12 January 2011

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Evenings and weekends are precious to us all. So don't waste children's time, and your own, by setting dull homework...

Homework – a compound word that resonates down the chalk dust swirling corridors of all our school days. Home: warmth, security, a place to relax. Work: well, fill this one in yourself, why don’t you?

The point is, the two things don’t often sit well together and I have always been ambivalent about the value of homework for children under 11. An Ofsted inspector once told me that they’d stopped being critical of schools about parental attitudes to homework, because invariably half of parents thought the school set too little and the other half set too much, so schools couldn’t win (no change there, then).

Some parents think homework must be a ‘good thing’, without being quite sure why. They may have read it in the Daily Mail, or they may be of the “I had to do it and it never did me any harm” school of thought, in which case what’s wrong with flogging and outside lavatories?

These may well be the same parents who can remember how to do quadratic equations; unlike me whose secondary school child regularly weeps into her calculator at half nine of a Tuesday evening whilst bewailing the fact her parent is a mathematical imbecile. (Watch out, I riposte, it’s genetic.)

When homework has a positive impact

The nub of the matter is that homework is only useful when meaningful, related to and supporting class based work, well matched to the child, time limited and marked with top notch feedback from the teacher. Sadly, this is only the case in a minority of cases. Having got those longwinded caveats off my chest, here are some suggestions where homework can be manageable (for both the setter and the doer) and have a positive impact.

6 creative homework tasks

Interview a family member about their school days, work, play, food, etc. This develops questioning skills and can be recorded rather than written. Digital dictaphones are available for 20 quid and are within the reach of most schools. Results can be shared and presented in any way from a video presentation to a pie chart.

2. Pack a suitcase

Following some input on WWII and the mass evacuation of the young, set the children the task of making their own evacuation suitcase. (Some children will literally make one out of cardboard, but it’s the contents that are the key). What five things would they take with them and why? They can write this, or simply talk through their suitcase with the rest of the class. It’s the thinking behind this task that is the real learning. The speaking/ listening/writing is, as so often, a secondary benefit.

3. Flour babies

Read Anne Fine’s tremendous book of the same name, then provide the children with their very own flour baby (basically a 1 kilo bag of flour they have to look after as if it’s a baby). Children will draw faces on theirs, dress it, even push it to school in a toy buggy. Again, the real learning is in the thinking and empathy the activity generates.

4. Parent portraits

Sketch a parent in Henry Moore / Lucian Freud style, i.e. unflatteringly. It’s great fun, gives the parents a break from the child’s “I don’t know what to draw” cry and is a chance to look at more recent British artists.

5. Set up a museum

Our Y3 and Y4 children were recently given the task of designing their own Egyptian artefact at home. Resourcefulness from children – irrespective of family background – was stunning. We received several hieroglyphic scrolls (rolled up around cotton reels, rubbed with a tea bag to give the ageing effect) a multiplicity of pyramids (made from card, plasticine, lego), sarcophaguses, jewellery and lots of mummified Barbies and Kens. The class was turned into a museum, with carefully written exhibit cards and children curators on hand to explain the historical background to why the Egyptians valued these things, and opened up to parents and other classes on a Friday afternoon.

6. Serve breakfast

Sanctions for not having done homework don’t work, rewards do. Compare “If you don’t hand in homework you’ll miss break / lunch / PE / life.” With ” If you do hand it in regularly you’ll be invited to the end of half term Big Breakfast in the hall where your teacher will serve you toast, cereal, yoghurts, juice, etc.” Simple really, and a special occasion to look forward to at the end of half term.

Level the playing field

Set up a homework club…

For those children who don’t have access to books, internet, paper, pencils, scissors, glue at home, you could start a homework club and give those attending use of the school’s ICT facilities. For those familes who are ‘book poor’ you need to make sure your own library is well provided for. Last Christmas I asked assembly, “How many of you got some sort of a book as a Christmas present?” Less than half the hands went up. In the People’s Republic of Harcombe, when I get round to setting it up, the giving of books as presents would be enforced by presidential decree.

Throw the book at them

When parents ask about homework for their child I always respond that a) the best thing for a child to do of an evening is have some quality time with family and friends, sit down for a meal together, play a sport, learn a musical instrument or sing and not feel badgered into working all the hours God sends, and b) reading is just about the best homework anyone, adult or child, can do.

Parents don’t count reading as homework, see, and we need to educate them (this parent thinks homework is when you have indentations in your finger from holding the pen/tapping the keyboard for three hours, because writing is homework).

Time spent reading is seldom wasted and is either entertaining, thought provoking or informative or – just like this article, hopefully – all three. If you like you can structure what the children read by recommending lists (The Redlands Ten – ten books to read before you’re 10) to add a little challenge to the task. Local libraries might be able to help by ordering multiple copies of books for those parents that can’t/won’t buy them. Children get a certificate (and a book!) when they complete the ten.

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Free literacy teaching resources

Browse reading activities and lesson ideas for a range of topics that will make teaching literacy and English more accessible and engaging for your students. See below for a selection of resources you can access for free.

Our resources are perfect for teachers and literacy practitioners in primary and secondary schools, and early years settings.

• Discover highlights in the list below, or explore our full selection of resources .
• To support families we also have a comprehensive web portal, grouped by age, with links to lots of free home-learning activities on Words for Life .

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Literacy teaching ideas, resources and reading activities spanning different ages and phases that align with key awareness and celebration dates in the planning calendar for schools and settings.

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13 Fun Reading Activities for Any Book

Whether you walk into a classroom in Asia, North America or Europe, you will almost certainly see teachers and students building their understanding of the world through a dedicated daily reading session full of great reading activities.

Books allow students an opportunity to be informed, entertained or escape as they comprehend fiction and non-fiction texts against their understanding of the world, their personal insights, and opinions and finally compare those texts to others.

Whilst you may have a wealth of books in your school library, developing fresh and engaging ways to study literature can often be challenging.  So today, we will explore 25 proven activities that can be applied to any book and at any age level.

These reading activities to improve reading comprehension are easy to follow and suitable for most age groups within an elementary/junior high school level.

125 Text Response ACTIVITIES, Games, Projects for ANY BOOK

This massive collection of ☀️ READING ACTIVITIES☀️ covers all essential reading skills for elementary/primary students. NO PREP REQUIRED! Works with all text and media types.

Thousands of teachers have adopted this as a GO-TO RESOURCE for independent and group tasks.

A COLLECTION OF FUN READING ACTIVITIES

A lifetime tale in pictures reading task.

Draw the main character from a book you have recently read.  Show them as a baby, middle-aged and an older person.

Underneath each picture, write what you think they might be doing at that point in their life, and explain why they may be doing so.

For example, if you drew Harry Potter as a baby, he might cast spells on his mum to feed him lots of yummy food.

Post-reading activities like this are accessible for all age groups to adapt their skill level and text style.

If you want to learn more about characters, read our complete guide here.

TEXT TO SELF-READING TASK

Based upon a book you have just read, share a  story about yourself related to an event or character in the book.

It is probably best done in the form of a written recount. Link your experience to no more than four situations that occurred within the text.

Text to self is an excellent opportunity for students to become introspective about the content they read and compare it to their own life experiences. 

This activity is appealing to teenagers more so than juniors .

IT’S IN THE INSTRUCTIONS READING TASK

From a book you have just read, select either a critical object or creature and create a user manual or a guide explaining how to care for it.

Ensure you use any vital information learnt from the book and any other information you consider essential.

If you are writing a user manual for an object, remember to focus on using it correctly and taking care of it.

If you are writing a user guide for an animal or creature, focus on keeping it alive and healthy as well as information that explains how to keep it happy and under control if necessary.

Dear Diary, READING TASK

Place yourself in the shoes of one of the characters you have just read about and write a diary entry of a critical moment from the story.

Try to choose a moment in the story where the character has plenty of interaction and emotion to share in a diary entry.

Your diary entry should be around a page long and contain information you learned from the book when the character was in that specific place and time.

Remember, when writing a diary entry, you are writing it from a first-person perspective. It is usually but not always written in the present tense.

Diary writing has been a very popular activity throughout time, but social media tools such as Facebook and blogging have in some ways changed this.

Mapping it all out, READING TASK

How do you make reading lessons fun? This reading activity answers that question confidently.

Have a go at drawing a map of one of the places from the text you have just read. See how much detail you can include, and be sure to discuss your map with another reader so you can compare and add more if necessary.

Take some time and effort to ensure your map appeals to the same audience the book aims at.

All good maps should contain the following BOLTS elements.

B – Bolts

O – Orientation

L – Legend

S – Scale

Express Yourself READING TASK

Using an iPad or a digital camera, make faces of the emotions the main characters would have gone through in your book and take photos of them. 

Put them together in a document on your computer or device and explain the emotion below the image and when the character would have felt this way.

This is an excellent opportunity to use some creative direction for this task.

Be sure to play around with the images, filters and graphical styling available.

Travel Agent READING TASK

Think of yourselves as a group of travel assistants whose job is to promote a  city of your choice from the text you have been reading.

As a group, you need to develop a concept map of all the exciting things that happen in your city and then present it to the class.

Don’t forget all of the exciting things such as theatres, restaurants, sports, adventure activities, entertainment and much more…

If you are a little short on details of the location of your story, do some research if it was an actual location or just get creative and make up some locations and tourist attractions based on what you read.

You’re Hired READING TASK

Select a character from a book and consider what might be an excellent job for them. You can choose something entirely suitable such as a security guard job for Superman or a more oddball approach, such as a pastry chef.

Either way, you will have to write a letter from this character’s perspective and apply for a position.

Be sure to explain why your character would be a great employee and what special skills they would possess to make them ideal for the role. Sell your character by explaining all the great attributes they possess.

What’s the Status? READING TASK

Create a Facebook page for your character with some status updates about what they have been up to.

Include some pictures and ensure your status updates are relevant to the character and the story.

Around 3 – 4 status updates with mages should give an overall picture of the character.

Use your status updates to explore what your character does for a job, leisure time, places they might go on vacation and the like.

Bubbles and Clouds READING TASK

Using speech bubbles and pictures of the characters, draw a conversation between two characters from the story you have read.

Remember, thought is drawn as a cloud, and a spoken statement is drawn as a  bubble.

Be sure to look at some comics or graphic novels for inspiration and insights.

This activity is usually best done on pen and paper, but numerous digital apps and tools will allow you to make this a reality through technology.

Amazing Artifacts READING TASK

An artifact is an object that has some significance or meaning behind it. Sometimes, an artefact might even have a very important story behind it.  I am sure you have a favorite toy, or your parents have a particular item in the house that they would consider an important artifact.

For today’s task, you will select five artifacts from the text you have been reading and explain what makes them significant or essential.

They don’t all have to be super important to the story, but I am sure that at least a couple played a significant role.

Be sure to draw a picture of the artifact and if necessary, label it.

FREE READING ACTIVITIES RESOURCE TO DOWNLOAD

Thinking Differently READING TASK

Choose three important events from the text and explain how you would have handled them differently from the characters in the story.

Explain how it may have changed the story’s outcome in either a minor or significant way.

Be insightful here and think of the cause and effect.  Sometimes your smallest action can have a significant impact on others.

Popplet Mind Mapping Task

Popplet is a mind mapping tool that allows you to connect ideas together using images, text and drawings.

From a text, you have recently read, create a family tree or network diagram that explains the relationship the characters have with each other.

Some may be father and son, husband and wife or even arch enemies.

Try and lay it out so it is easy to follow.

You Have Three Wishes READING TASK

A genie lands at the midpoint of the story you have just read and grants the two main characters three wishes.

What do they wish for and why?

Finally, would their wishes have changed anything about the story?  How so?

Again think about the cause and effect relationship and how this may have altered the path of the book you have been reading.

A COMPLETE DIGITAL READING UNIT FOR STUDENTS

Over 30 engaging activities for students to complete BEFORE, DURING and AFTER reading ANY BOOK

• Compatible with all devices and digital platforms, including GOOGLE CLASSROOM.
• Fun, Engaging, Open-Ended INDEPENDENT tasks.
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Top 7 Reading Comprehension Strategies for Students and Teachers

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Identifying the main idea of the story: A Guide for Students and Teachers

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Reading Activities

Practise your reading every day. These activities will help you to improve. 

These websites have some really useful resources.

Click on the links to use them.

• E-Book Library Help your young child learn to read, and love to read, with this range of over 100 free eBooks.
• Oxford Owl Reading Free reading resources by age group
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Reading VIPERS

What are Vipers?

VIPERS is an anagram to help the recall of the 6 reading areas or skills that children need to develop in order to read well.  They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.

VIPERS stands for:

V ocabulary

P rediction

E xplanation

S equence or  S ummarise

The following Reading VIPER packs give useful question guidelines that can be used to help develop a child's reading skills:

Reading VIPER packs

• Reading VIPERS Question Stems KS1 - PDF.pdf
• Reading VIPERS Question Stems KS2 - PDF.pdf

Reading Comprehension Activities

• Stage 4 Reading Packs - Age 8-9 a.pdf
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40 Book Based activities

• 40 Book Based Activities - 40 book based activities.pdf
• Literacy Shed Free Resources A fabulous website with literacy activities based around film
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Home › Lesson Ideas › Reading tasks for homework

Reading tasks for homework

By Pete on January 11, 2021 • ( 3 )

Hiya, hope online learning is going well.

Here are some random reading tasks I set for homework. Each student chooses one of these to do a week. These are in a big folder on my desk, but they’ll be adapted for online learning now probs. Still, you might find them useful. Ten for fiction, six for non-fiction.

Most of these are well-known, so not all my ideas or anything. Examples:

Here’s the doc:

Image by  pasja1000  from  Pixabay  

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Tags: eal , ESL , fiction , homework , ideas , non-fiction , reading , tefl

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20+ creative alternative homework ideas for teachers

When giving homework, it must always be based on learning goals your students have to reach, just like in your lessons. But it’s sad to see that lots of teachers are using homework as extra lesson time. Of course, as a teacher, you’re on a clock. But that doesn’t mean your students have to suffer from it and keep working on those boring textbooks and worksheets at home.

Consider goals like attitudes, real-life experiences, and practice, physical exercise, social encounters, creative solutions, and philanthropy as crucial as your lesson goals. These are things students don’t just pick up in your classroom. These are things they pick up in life.

In this blog post, I’ll give you some innovative homework ideas that will engage your students more. These alternatives to traditional homework will thereby also teach your students new things that can’t be taught in the classroom. You will find a variety of homework ideas: online and offline.

I will mention homework alternatives for primary school and high school. Some of these ideas can be changed a little bit, so they are the perfect fit for the right audience.

20 Creative homework ideas

You can divide homework tasks into the following themes or categories:

• Crafts & arts
• Outdoor activities & outings
• Games and activities
• Physical activities
• Digital or computer activities
• Philanthropy & social work

💡 Good to know : all the ready-to-use homework activities are created with BookWidgets . You can easily create activities like these yourself or duplicate an activity below for free, edit it if needed, and share it with your students. You can do so in the examples separately, or you can find all the homework examples in the BookWidgets Blog group folder .

Crafts and arts homework

1. prepare a dish from a recipe book.

2. Make a board game

3. Create a birdhouse

4. Transform a fictional book character into a hand puppet

Outdoor homework activities and outings

5. coupon game.

Students can also go grocery shopping with their parents. Here, they have to read the ingredients of the products and help their parents choose the healthiest products for the best prices, figure out the best deal between the sizes of items, …

6. Visit the zoo

7. Visit the local dumping ground or container park

8. Build a tree house

Games and activities as homework

9. bookwidgets games.

10. Minecraft

11. Play Cards

12. Play Zoo Tycoon or Rollercoaster Tycoon

Physical homework activities

13. rope skipping.

Many rope-skipping songs let your students do different tricks while rope-skipping. This is an excellent opportunity for homework as well. Ask your students to transform a rope skipping song into a song with lesson content. Let them count or spell or even sum up the different states or capitals. To engage their lifestyles even harder, you can additionally give them the assignment to create a TikTok in which they are jumping and singing.

Click here to see how you can get Tiktok more involved in the classroom.

14. Walking quest

If there aren’t any walking quests in the neighborhood, you could ask your students to create a walking quest like this for their fellow students. What a fun day it will be!

15. Obstacle Quiz

In order for students to answer the questions, they have to run and pass a challenging parkour. This is a fun homework exercise, and in the end, it’s a great lesson starter or lesson end.

16. Swimming games

After the activity, they can fill out an Exit Slip:

Digital or computer homework activities

17. create a picture album.

This teaches them to handle the online software, add pictures and write without spelling mistakes. And of course, creating memories is so much fun!

18. Video job application

19. Your life in 10 minutes - video

20. Email pen-pals

Is it still too complicated? Read the messages from your students, before they send them, and provide them with some feedback.

Philanthropy and social homework

21. grow a community garden.

22. Help in a retirement home

23. Help at a homeless shelter

24. Collect litter

Here’s another homework tip: Don’t call homework “homework”. Call it a challenge. Homework has become a negative word for students, and I bet they start rolling their eyes as you even mention the word.

Still looking for more inspiration? Check out the blog on short films and lesson activities that spice up your Google Classroom . Tip: even if you don’t use Google Classroom, there is a lot of inspiration back here.

Above you have read single assignments. But, you also have the option to involve your homework in a project. Find out more here .

So, as I mentioned earlier, there are many fun alternatives to traditional homework. Now it’s up to you to apply this in the classroom as well. In this folder , you will find all the examples you have come across.

Which idea do you or perhaps your students like the most? Let us know on Twitter . Of course, there are many more alternatives. If you have other ideas, you are always welcome to share it with other teachers in our Facebook group .

One more thing: don’t forget to say hi👋 on LikedIn .

Join hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and get the best content on technology in education.

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Scaffold with structure strips

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Use margin-sized prompts to help learners independently write focused answers

Source: © Maria Bloom/Ikon Images

Structure learning and deepen understanding with these neat writing aids

When I was at school, the teacher would often ask us to make notes on a particular topic. They would give us a textbook and then leave us to it. Inevitably, we would end up copying out the textbook fairly indiscriminately, producing a few pages of notes and receiving a tick from the teacher. While that worked just fine for me, as a motivated student with decent prior knowledge, it most definitely didn’t meet the needs of everyone in the class.

Thankfully, our understanding of how students learn and how to support them on their journey to becoming successful independent learners has progressed. We now understand that they need guidance to chunk topics in the best way for learning and that it’s optimal that they actively engage with texts.

Structure strips provide a magic wand to overcome the fear of a blank page

Structure strips  are a useful scaffold for students to complete independent work. They are strips of prompts and questions that fit into the margin of an A4 page. The students write their notes and answers next to each of the boxes. The boxes should be approximately the right size for the block of text they will add.

Structure strips (rsc.li/4drjeIP) are a useful scaffold for students to complete independent work. They are strips of prompts and questions that fit into the margin of an A4 page. The students write their notes and answers next to each of the boxes. The boxes should be approximately the right size for the block of text they will add.

Structure strips are a very versatile resource that can be used for different purposes at varying points in a learning cycle.

1. To support literacy

Put simply, structure strips get students to write . They seem to provide a magic wand to help them overcome the fear of a blank page. When I’ve used them with lower-achieving groups, learners have been amazed and proud of the work they produced using the strips.

Browse our collection

Support learners to find or retrieve information and write independently with structure strips on a growing range of topics. Each of our structure strip resources are printed five to a page and include model answers in the teacher guidance.

I tend to use structure strips with textbooks , which gives an additional opportunity to develop general literacy skills , especially reading. For less confident groups, read the text together as a class and clarify the meaning of key vocabulary before learners attempt the structure strip activity. It’s worth checking that the textbooks you plan to use contain all the necessary information. Even better, give the students two different textbooks to really dial up their study skills.

2. At the start of a topic

Structure strips can help students get an overview of a topic or set of objectives before you progress to other focuses, such as application or evaluation. They can be a good knowledge leveller, for example at transition points where it is difficult to know exactly what they’ve covered in their prior learning.

3. At the end of a topic or for revision

By the time students have completed a sequence of learning, they should be able to tackle the prompts in structure strips without a supporting resource like a textbook. Using one pen colour, they can write their independent responses and then fill in any gaps using another colour. This helps them be specific with their revision later. Structure strips may include exam-style question prompts to challenge students.

4. For cover lessons

It can be tricky to plan for cover lessons as students all have different levels of prior knowledge and skills. Ideally, you need something that students can complete independently without having to trouble the cover teacher with questions, and there needs to be enough work to keep them busy and prevent mischief! Structure strips are designed to support students in completing independent work, so they fit the brief perfectly for a cover lesson, especially when used with textbooks. A structure strip would usually take 25 to 30 minutes to complete properly, so you’d need to include other activities as well. This could be reading time, defining key words or perhaps completing an exam question based on the structure strip, such as in this nanomaterials resource . 

It can be tricky to plan for cover lessons as students all have different levels of prior knowledge and skills. Ideally, you need something that students can complete independently without having to trouble the cover teacher with questions, and there needs to be enough work to keep them busy and prevent mischief! Structure strips are designed to support students in completing independent work, so they fit the brief perfectly for a cover lesson, especially when used with textbooks. A structure strip would usually take 25 to 30 minutes to complete properly, so you’d need to include other activities as well. This could be reading time, defining key words or perhaps completing an exam question based on the structure strip, such as in this nanomaterials resource (rsc.li/3JrX3EM). 

5. For homework

You can use structure strips for homework. However, you’ll need to plan carefully to make sure students have the same access to support resources so they can be successful. It can be tempting to just tell students to use the internet, but they will need your help to choose good sites with appropriate content.

More like this

• Teaching metallic bonding at 14–16? Use this  scaffolded writing activity  to get students to describe the metallic bonding model and explain how this leads to particular properties in metals.
• Or ionic bonding at 14–16? Here’s another  structure strip activity  to help your students understand the models and diagrams used to represent ions and their bonds.
• Help your learners understand covalent bonding diagrams and their limitations with this  structure strip activity .
• When teaching allotropes of carbon, help your students retrieve information on the  structure and bonding in different forms of carbon .

Kristy Turner

More from Kristy Turner

Particle diagrams | Structure strip | 14–16

Atoms and ions | Structure strip | 14–16

Structure of the atom | Structure strip | 14–16

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By Kristy Turner

Support learners to describe and evaluate the particle model for solids, liquids and gases with this writing activity

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Support learners to recall and write about the properties of subatomic particles and the structure of an atom

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Y6 15 minute reading activities - 9 activities for 9 days!

Subject: English

Age range: 7-11

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

24 April 2019

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A resources created for morning activities, reading starters, homework or just to do with your class!

Brilliant resource for the lead up to SATS with a grammar focus too. Also good for encouraging a love of reading with the children!

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This is an amazing resource and such great texts have been chosen. Thank you

Empty reply does not make any sense for the end user

watchorn_tracey_l

A great resource for remote learning grid tasks - very self-directed for year 6 students and can be differentiated (Q1-4 support/all) Q4-8/9 At level) and the wonderful Extension section of 2-3 questions for going further (Aug 2021).

Thank you for sharing - a great resource

Davidmervyn

Way too difficult for year 6. Paranthesis example? Where? A word which means ‘risky manoeuvre ‘’ I cant find one and have been in education for over 40 years.Are there answers for these please?! Thank you

Fantastic resource, especially for home learning. Thank you for saving me so much time!

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