I know this a very controversial topic, but I was always a firm believer that students should always take something from school to do at home. Especially when, like here in Cape Verde, they only have classes in the morning and end up spending the entire afternoon at home, most likely watching TV or playing computer games.
(I have nothing against watching TV or playing computer games, by the way. I just don't think children need to spend hours on a row attached to these things...)
So, I always sent some homework. Granted, in the first year, I may have sent too much but in my defense my class had 11 school books (yes, eleven!) and the parents really didn't seem happy to spend so much money on them if they weren't being put into use. So, in class I used the books made by the Ministry of Education and for homework I would use the books that we asked the kids to buy as an additional support. And yes, they worked a lot, but they still had time to play and have fun and they ended up learning a lot and moving very quickly through the subjects, so it worked out well. When they moved up to second grade, I would still use pretty much the same method, but I had a better idea already of the rhythm we had to follow, so I would send a little bit less per day than I probably did in the first year. But every day, I would write their homework on the homework board, they would copy it to their notebooks and then do it at home.
At Cabeça Carreira, for example, the teachers rarely sent any work home, because most of the children would spend the afternoons alone, or with older siblings, doing house chores so homework wasn't exactly the priority. School work was done at school, house work was done at home. And it's ok to see things like that. Because these kids really worked at home! Most of them were given “adult tasks” such as clean the house, work on the fields, feed the animals, do the shopping... So they were doing their own type of learning, which is also a very important type of learning.
At Chickering on the other hand, most teachers were using weekly homework sheets, where they would assign all the tasks that needed more attention from the student throughout that week. Each student would get his sheet on Monday, so the students and the parents knew exactly what was expected of them, allowing the parents to follow their kid's learning process a little bit more easily. Being an individualized worksheet, this way the teacher was also able to control each student's progress a lot more specifically, knowing exactly what they needed to improve, where they needed more support and which skills they had already dominated.
At the same time, it was interesting to me to see that in some cases, like the living situation for most kids in Chão Bom (Cabeça Carreira), homework is really not the most important thing because they won't have the necessary support at home to help them overcome their difficulties. So it's better to work those needs at school and allow them to do their own life learning at home.
What do you think about homework? Is it something you give your students every day? How often do they get it?