As a highly trusted education resource providers for Australian primary school teachers (having resourced classrooms of over 100,000 school teachers around Australia), parents of primary-aged triplets and an older daughter with autism, we found the typical homework to vary dramatically between each of our children. The workload was vastly different. In many cases, it seemed unfair when one child received twice the workload of another child in the same grade. Homework was time-consuming and uninspiring. Every afternoon became a battle between weary children and parents to get the work done.
We decided to do something about it. We put together a team of passionate senior Australian primary teachers and we set about writing homework that not only addressed the Australian curriculum and met the needs of the classroom teacher, but engaged, rewarded and provided feedback to children for their effort.
Research has shown that homework without purpose or feedback is meaningless, and that significant benefits are achieved when that homework is meaningful with constant, relevant and consistent feedback.
Every child receives a weekly certificate which states their 3 greatest areas of improvement as well as their 3 areas of greatest challenge. This encourages them to measure their progress against their own previous achievements, rather than being measured against other students’ successes.
Homework Hound also provides additional optional educational activities to help improve those areas of challenge, including online games that measure improvement over time, songs developed to improve recall of times tables and number facts, ‘no-cook’ easy to follow recipes to make at home, science experiments to conduct and more.
