Homework Reduction

My daughter has been acting up, or at least trying to, lately. Her main rebellion case is her Chinese homework and piano practice assignments. Can't blame her much on that. Her piano teacher requires practicing five days a week, at least half an hour each.

We are at the last lesson in the Book 1 of our Chinese text book. For book one, the homework assignment is four times a week. Depending how she handles it, each sitting could take anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes. She has been doing a great job finishing all of them so far, until last week, which I allowed her to skip some of them after a few minor episodes of parenting struggles.

Spring is also around us. We are coming into a two-week span that her swimming and soccer overlap, during which she has swimming classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and soccer practices on Tuesday and Thursday. (She will stop swimming after the two weeks and resume after the soccer season.) I am not sure if I could get any extra homework done if I got that kind of schedule myself!

So, something has to be done with the Chinese homework. The homework we have are seven parts:

1. CD-ROM (listen to the lesson on computer and play a character-scramble game)
   
2. Character writing (two characters at a time, writing 8 times each),
3. Read lesson aloud
4. Read reading materials (did not require her to read aloud)
5. Recognize Chinese characters with cards
6. Play a character scramble game with cards
7. Write a sentence using given phrases (This is only done once the whole week)

Other than no 2 and 7, the assignments are the same, repeated for four times. She likes to do the CD-ROM, character writing, and writing sentence part but hates the others.

I thought that the no. 6 is probably the most time-consuming and least-productive task of them all, especially that she is already doing a similar thing on CD-ROM. So, I dropped that from her assignment altogether. She could still play it at her leisure time, I suggested.

For the others, I require to finish all four settings for Nos 1, 2, and 7, the items she has been enjoying. and do the No. 3, 4, and 5 at least twice, preferably three times. This will reduce the homework time probably almost in half. She is happy about the arrangement. We will see how she works it out this couple of weeks.

The homework assignment structure will change slightly once we start Book 2. So, we will have to revisit this issue in the near future.