Almost every school and other educational institutes give summer, winter, and autumn holiday breaks to the learners. These holidays are for a longer period and are also known as vacations to enjoy, relax, and have a break from regular classes. In these holidays to keep students productive and engaged with learning activities, holiday homework is given by the teachers. But often, students run away from doing homework and use all the time in leisure activities. Let us discuss some very effective tips which teachers can use to ensure that all students complete the assigned holiday homework properly.
Benefits of holiday homework to the students
Helps to effectively use the time:
Summer and winter school vacations are long and students get enough time to enjoy and relax but this doesn’t mean that the whole vacation time should be enjoyed and doing nothing productive. Along with chilling, hanging out, and cherishing vacations, holiday homework ensures that students utilize some time in doing innovative activities and learning. This also improves their creativity and time management skills.
Make students productive :
Yes, we know that holidays are there to enjoy and have a little break from regular school classes. But in between all this, holiday homework makes students productive at these times as well. Innovative activities such as projects, and model making, make students explore and do productive and interesting work.
Helps to explore and collaborate:
Holiday homework such as discussing with people, conducting surveys, and collecting different material, content makes students explore and collaborate with others. Investigating projects such as surveying the neighborhood shops and people allow students to meet and interact with people. Also, it improves collaboration between parents and children. Together they work on the holiday homework and have good family time and space.
How to ensure students complete holiday homework: steps to follow
- Don’t give very difficult topics
Holiday homework, if set to be difficult and complex, will not be completed by the students. This will make students don’t do anything productive in their vacations and also reduce their engagement with learning. Therefore, teachers should choose topics that are simple and easy to find and make. Simple holiday homework topics ensure that more students will make and submit them. While designing the homework consider the topics which have a lot of content available in textbooks and on the internet. This will help students to easily explore the content and gather the necessary material quickly.
- Give learning homework as well
Many times, students give a lot of projects, models, and other hand-making activities to students. For subjects such as mathematics, science, computer, and social science teachers give models and projects as holiday homework. Yes, these activities surely enhance the creative skills and experience of the students but along with this, some learning homework should also be given.
This will make sure that even on holidays when students are not having classes, they are engaged with their learning. For example for maths, you can give homework on learning tables, solving exercises and formulas, etc. For other theoretical subjects, you can give the homework of making lesson-wise notes, learning question answers, paragraph writing, composing essays, and doing handwriting, and much more.
- Give technology-based work
Many times, students run away from doing holiday homework. Making lengthy handwritten projects and sheets is quite boring and less engaging for them. But we all know that today’s kids enjoy technology a lot. Technical work and activities which are done via computers, mobile and laptops are enjoyed by students a lot. So why not replace the ordinary and monotonous work with technical ones.
For example, you can give students a topic on which they can speak and record themselves instead of writing on it. Making PowerPoint presentations, completing quizzes via an online education app, making animations, charts and graphs are a few such ideas. All these audio-visual activities can ensure that students are utilizing their vacations and completing their holiday homework successfully.
- Keep it creative and interesting
Students consider their vacations and holidays as a time to relax, chill, enjoy, play around and study less. To ensure that they are engaged in learning and making holiday homework, assign them work that is interesting and creative. Anything which will be boring and monotonous will not catch students’ attention and engagement, especially on vacations. Therefore select some innovative and creative topics for them. You can also take suggestions from students about what type of work they would like to do and later decide accordingly.
- Instruct them on the rules
Instructing and explaining to students about what is being assigned to them is very important. After deciding on the holiday homework, explain the process and tips to complete it to the learners. Also, tell them the rules such as when they can submit the work. Instruct them on the procedure, deadline of submission, and marking scheme.
Conclusion
Many times we have seen students not successfully completing the holiday homework. But by reading the benefits, we can make out that it is very beneficial for the students. All the above-mentioned tips can be used by the teachers to ensure that all students do their holiday homework properly and effectively.