"They Said to make a College": Families' Perceptions of
Kindergarten Homework Tasks
Patricia F. Hearron
Michigan State University
Bethany and her mother entered the kindergarten classroom
several minutes after all the other children. They walked
slowly, carrying between them a three-dimensional cardboard
model of a building with a cutaway view of interior doors,
furnishings, and a number of small signs. As they placed
the model at the front of the room where group discussions were
held, Bethany's mother explained that they had created this
structure because "They said to make a college." Later that
morning, Bethany showed her teacher and classmates the
labels which identified her model as a local business
college, the doorways as exits, and a desk as belonging to
the secretary. (Fieldnotes 1/10/91)
Bethany's mother did in fact work at, as well as attend, the
business college represented by the model and it was obvious both
that someone had spent a great deal of time constructing it, and
that Bethany clearly understood the elements represented. To
understand why Bethany's mother thought "they" wanted her to
"make a college" with her daughter, one need only refer to the
printed directions for the children's "homework" for Week I of
January.
Help your child make a collage (an interesting arrangement
of materials) from materials around the home. Some ideas of
materials are: scraps of cloth, scraps of paper, yarn,
pictures from old greeting cards, pieces of ribbon, etc..
Paste the collage on one side of a paper sack. Send [it] to
school to be enjoyed by the group. (School Handout, January
1991)
No one commented on the substitution of "college," for "collage,"
and it might be argued that constructing the model with her
mother was as meaningful for Bethany as were the more
conventional interpretations of the assignment for the four other
children in the class who completed it. Nevertheless, the
incident helped to crystallize a question that had been forming
since I began observing this kindergarten classroom a few months
earlier: What actually happens when parents work with their
kindergarten children on tasks assigned by the school? This
question grew, in part, out of my interest in literacy
acquisition. Recent research supports the growing
recognition that children encounter, and begin to form their own
notions about the meaning of written language, just as they do
oral language, long before they enter school (e.g., Clay, 1975;
Bissex, 1980; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Taylor, 1983). The
focus on literacy experiences before school coincides with the
finding that those experiences vary widely between white,
middle-class (mainstream) children and others (Heath, 1983) and
the suggestion that the home experiences of non-mainstream
children do not prepare them to benefit from school literacy
instruction (e.g., McCormick & Mason, 1986). Programs to
meliorate the perceived "deficiency" frequently encourage parents
to work on school-like tasks with their children, and there is
evidence that teachers who place a low value on parent
involvement in general are more likely to make such requests of
less educated parents (Epstein, 1986). The efficacy of parent
involvement programs in general, and of homework in particular,
remains in dispute (Powell, 1989; McDermott, Goldman, & Varenne,
1984), while the process through which homework is completed,
particularly in kindergarten, has received little attention
(e.g., McDermott et al., 1984; Chandler, Argyris, Barnes,
Goodman, & Snow, 1986). When I mentioned this topic to people
outside the field of early education, several reacted with
surprise that kindergarten homework existed. This paper is a
partial presentation of the findings in a study undertaken to
examine that process.
Methods
What follows is a brief overview of the methods used.
Details appear in the writer's dissertation, currently in
progress. The project site, selected because the population met
the definition of non-mainstream (i.e., ethnic minority and/or
low income), was a public school kindergarten and adjacent
neighborhoods in a small midwestern industrial city. The morning
kindergarten class included one caucasian, one hispanic, two
bi-racial, and thirteen African American children. Sixteen
children received free breakfasts and fourteen families received
Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). Six families (one hispanic and
five African American) volunteered to participate in the homework
study; four lived in a subsidized multi-unit housing complex and
two in privately owned single family dwellings.
Data were collected throughout the 1990-1991 academic year,
from September 19 through June 20. I entered the classroom as a
participant observer (assistant to the teacher) one morning per
week, arriving about an hour before the children and leaving
shortly after them. Observations focused on the classroom as a
whole and fieldnotes were expanded and transcribed on a computer
immediately after each observation. In February, all seventeen
families were invited to participate in a study of homework
requiring that they tape record themselves as they worked on the
various tasks with their children. I provided each of the six
families that volunteered with a tape recorder and blank tape,
requesting that the parent turn on the recorder whenever she
began a homework activity with her child and emphasizing that
families were not expected to do any additional activities for
the specific purpose of recording them. Tapes were made
between February 23 and June 19, 1991. Home visits with each
family were scheduled at three or four week intervals to review
and retrieve completed tapes and provide additional blank tapes.
During the visits, family members provided clarification of
language on the tapes and the circumstances under which the
recordings were made. Four families produced four tapes each,
while the remaining two produced two and three tapes
respectively. In total, the six families produced nearly eleven
hours of tape recorded homework.
After all the tapes had been collected and classroom
observations completed, I interviewed five parents and the
teacher, tape recording each interview and transcribing the tapes
myself. Finally, I collected and photocopied examples of writing
and drawing that the children did during the classroom
observations, and as many completed homework products as
possible. All university requirements for the protection of
human subjects were met.
Findings
During the school year, the families were asked to assist
their children with five types of homework tasks: (a) a series of
weekly "Parent/Child Home Activities" (including the previously
described collage, for which written instructions were sent home
each month; (b) a page, labelled with a single letter of the
alphabet, and sent home each week for children to fill with
examples of words beginning with that letter; (c) blank booklets,
sent home several times during the year to be filled with
drawings and writing on some seasonal theme; (d) practice in
skills, such as letter or numeral recognition, on which parents
were urged to spend a few minutes each day with their children;
(e) storybooks, which children were allowed to select and take
home, beginning in January, after their parents signed and
returned a contract agreeing to read them aloud. The
Kindergarten Parent/Child Home Activities are the focus of this
paper. The teacher explained that this series had been devised
several years earlier by a group of teachers and administrators
with the purpose of fostering language development. She recorded
returned assignments on a large chart near the door and displayed
them on a bulletin board. She promised at the beginning of the
year that children who completed all the assignments would
receive a prize and, at mid-year, said that she had been giving
candy to children who brought in completed work, with the result
that several parents had begun requesting replacements for lost
assignment sheets. On the last day of school, one child received
a stuffed animal for returning all the assignments; four others
received prizes for completing "six months' homework." Table 1
summarizes the number of Parent/Child Home Activities returned by
each of the six children throughout the school year, as well as
the number and duration of tape recorded activities.
Table 1
Parent/Child Homework Activities
Child
Number
Returned
Number
Recorded
Cumulative
Duration
% of Taped
Activities
A
3
0
0
0
B
14
3
29 min.
17.1%
C
24
9
69 min.
69.6%
D
0
1
4 min.
2.3%
E
8
2
41 min.
31.3%
F
6
1
5 min.
16.1%
The data revealed that for many families homework involved
siblings in addition to, or instead of, parents and suggested
several possible impediments to completing the tasks: lack of
cooperation from the children, parents' lack of confidence in
their own abilities, lack of time and lack of materials. The
focus of this paper, however, is on the finding that the six
families differed from each other and from the teacher in their
perceptions of the objectives of the homework tasks. One mother
seemed to believe that the activities were intended to teach
specific content and, because she felt her daughter already knew
it, she did not complete the activities.
I didn't do the activities where once a week you had to do
something different. I didn't do it for my son [either]. I
didn't think that was worth it. She's as smart as I don't
know what....It was boring to me....[The teacher] asked
about things that--like some things be bigger or smaller.
Put 'em on a piece of paper or cut 'em out a magazine or
something like that. And I just asked [my child] what was
bigger, what was smaller. And I didn't do it. I just asked
her to see if she knew it herself. (Mother D, Interview
6/20/91)
Another mother seemed unsure of the purpose of the tasks and
asked her son whether the other children had been doing their
homework and whether they "talk[ed] about these things in class
or what?" Instead of answering her question he raised his
customarily soft voice and yelled, "That's our homework, Ma.
Don't you understand?" (Child C, Tape 3/28/91). This mother said
she usually waited until the middle of the month and completed
all four homework assignments in one setting. She said that
doing the homework taught her child
...what school is like. I'm gonna have to be bringing
things home and doing it. I'm gonna have to make time
[and]...to discipline myself. (Mother C, Interview 6/5/91).
Yet a third mother, during one of the home visits, expressed a
firm conviction that it was important to work on a given
assignment during the specified week of each month because "They
do lessons in school on these things during the week" (Fieldnotes
4/18/91). In contrast to each of these, the teacher said
she did not try to coordinate her classroom activities with the
printed assignments, but considered them "something extra" for
parents to do with their children. However, she felt that doing
all the assignments at once had little value:
... and I know when a parent brings in two months of
homework at one time, and they've done it over night, I know
there hasn't been any learning in that. And this is what
happened with one of my afternoon little girls. I know her
parents brought in two months at one time....[The mother] just
did it and sent it just so the girl could get some stickers
on it. (Teacher, Interview 6/20/91)
Although their understanding of the purposes of these
particular activities differed from the teacher's, the parents
seemed to share her implicit belief that spending time by doing
"something extra" with their children was valuable. Even the
mother who said she did not do these activities, did spend time
on other types of homework, and several others expressed the idea
that the activities were pleasurable. One mother asserted that
it was "good for parents to spend time with their kids," and
added, "That's what's wrong: most parents don't" (Fieldnotes
5/16/91). She said she enjoyed the homework activities and
believed that, by working with their children, parents could have
a positive impact on attitudes toward learning:
I liked it all. Anything--right. 'Cause see, anything you
get involved with your children you know it give them the
courage to go on anyway. And that's what I been trying to
do. [It's] VERY important. It make 'em want to do it. You
know, learn how to use the scissors and go through the newspaper
and find the letters. (Mother E, Interview 6/13/91).
In short, the data indicated that, while the parents shared
the teacher's view that their involvement was important for their
children's success, their perception of the purposes of the
homework influenced whether they did it with their children at
all and which tasks they chose to do. Their perception also
affected the way they did those tasks. Four families recorded
work on one particular activity and the results revealed
variations in the extent to which they focused on content versus
form as well as in the degree to which children were able to
influence the task. These are the printed instructions for the
assignment:
Cut open a paper bag and lay it flat. At the top of the
paper bag trace around your child's hand. Now have your
child dictate to you what hands are for. Start with the
sentence "Hands are for:" Send the bag to school to share
with the class. (School Handout, April 1991) One child
worked on the activity with her sixteen year old sister for five
minutes and never brought the completed work to school. Twice
her sister told her to "shut up" or "pay attention here" when she
made any comment other than a direct answer to the question, and
responded to each of the child's suggestions with "What else?" as
though testing the child's knowledge of the topic. The child's
suggestions became more elaborate and reflective of her actual
surroundings, progressing from "eating" and "clapping" to "taking
down curtains and washing [them]," "taking down pictures,"
"rocking a baby to sleep." After abruptly changing the subject
and spending another five minutes on an alphabet task, the sister
reviewed the homework:
Sister: Today what have you learned?
Child: Um. About han--
Sister: About what?
Child: About hands? And about words.
Sister: ...And you learned about what your hands are
for, right? (Child F, Tape 5/16/91)
Another child worked on the assignment with his mother for
eight minutes. In contrast with the previous example, this
mother commented on his suggestions and reviewed what he had said
before asking "what else?" However, she retained control of the
form and content of the work. When he told her that "You're
supposed to do it with pictures" [instead of just printing
words], she murmured, "Mmhmm," and continued printing the words.
She offered him a choice of colors, which she then rescinded, and
only after three requests from him did she allow him to take a
minor part in the process: Mother: Come here. We're
gonna trace your hand. Put it on here. Pick out a
color from here. We'll use a color crayon and that way
we can see it.
Child: Oh.
Mother: Pick out a nice dark color we can see.
Child: This.
Mother: That's brown. It won't show up too good.
Pick a blue or a red or something.
Child: What?
Mother: Use this color.
Child: OK. Can I trace it?
Mother: Stretch your hand out.
Child: Let me trace one, Ma.
Mother: Open your fingers.
Child: Can I do it?
Mother: OK, good! Just go over some of these little
places that are kinda light, OK?
Child: OK. (Child C, Tape 4/18/91)
She countered her child's suggestion with her own and
pursued it until the child showed he accepted and understood it.
Mother: Reading? What about talking? Some people
have to talk with their hands because they can't speak.
Remember? Child: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Mother: Hands are for talking.
Child: 'K.
Mother: You know what I'm talking about?
Child: Yeah.
Mother: You know how people that can't talk they use
their hands to talk? They have sign language for
talking. Child: That's what I'm gonna say.
Mother: They have sign language.
Child: Like when you go like this sometimes we
might...when people don't know how to talk and
they...want to get you to know that they love you,
sometimes they go like this. Like that, huh? (Child C,
Tape 4/18/91)
The child shaped the process by editing his ideas, as well as his
mother's transcription of them. She accepted his suggestion of
"writing" and concurred with his decision that "coloring" was the
same thing and therefore should be omitted. However, she
apparently ignored his emphatic "Ma, don't say that!" when she
proposed that hands were for eating. He told her "You got that
right," when she read what she wrote, and introduced an element
of letter-sound association by telling his mother about his final
suggestion, "Zipping your coat up," "That starts with a Z, huh?"
(Child C, Tape 4/18/91). The third child began her attempt
to influence the process by urging that the activity be started.
Child: Ma, we gonna hafta do my hand?...You know we
hafta do my hand....She say she needed our hand homework
Mother: OK, we gonna do that to-- uh, uh--
Child: Tonight?
Mother: When you come home Sunday we gonna do it.
Child: We can do it now. It won't take long to do it.
Mother: Yeah, but I gotta fry the fish. (Child E, Tape
4/12/91)
Throughout the six minutes involving this assignment which
appeared on the subsequent tape, the child asserted her ownership
of the project, telling her mother, "Ma, you know I have to do it
with ya," and "Ma, you can't tell me. I have to think." She
also told her mother where to print the words and, judging from
the appearance of the finished product, her mother did as
directed. Sometimes her mother responded with an appeal to the
written directions, "It didn't say that," although she acquiesced
to the child's directions more frequently. However, when the
child suggested with a giggle that "Hands are when you go to the
bathroom you wipe yourself," her mother was less compliant and
said, "I ain't gonna put that on there" (Child E, Tape 5/16/91).
In contrast to these families, the fourth treated the
assignment as an exercise in copying print. In addition to
tracing the child's hand, labelling the bag, and printing some of
the words, this mother helped her daughter cut and categorize
illustrations from magazines. The following exchange is one of
several that occurred as the child copied words (in this case,
"eating") during the 22 minute segment of this activity that was
taped. Mother: Now see? You started going down.
Where you gonna go? All the way down here? And your T
is upside down almost 'cause you made it so low. Keep
goin'. Child: N.
Mother: Looks like a H. You can't do it.
Child: G.
Mother: Now does that look like this one?
Child: This how the other one is.
Mother: No, because this part--so that you see this
looks like a G from my way but you have to turn the
paper like this in order for it to look the same. See,
you just have to learn to take time when you do
something....
Child: It look upside down!
Mother: Yes it does. Yes it does.
Child: Like this it do. (Child B, Tape 4/18/91)
It seems clear that this parent considered "correct" writing
to be at least a part of the purpose for the homework, and to a
certain extent, this goal was shared by the teacher, who said
that she worked all year on getting the children to understand
the difference between a letter and a word, to put spaces between
words, and to adhere to the convention of printing from left to
right on their papers. She also identified what she considered
the "best writer" in her classroom in terms of legibility,
although she added that other criteria were important as well.
Making the letters clearer doesn't always make a good writer
but I think putting thought into what you're saying. And
wanting to be different from the others. (Teacher,
Interview 6/20/91)
One of her goals was to help children develop the concept of
writing as recorded speech: And so this is what I try to go
on with the kids. Saying it and then writing it, you can
see it and then you write it yourself. And then after you write
it you can go back and read it. (Teacher, Interview
6/20/91)
Listening to the mother who struggled to direct her child's
printing makes it difficult to escape the conclusion that these
other goals for the writing tasks were being subordinated to the
goal of "correct" form. However, another example from the same
taped episode suggests that the child retained a focus on meaning
and was concerned that her writing make sense to others. When
her mother said that the children in one picture were "shooting
baskets," this exchange occurred:
Child: How do you shoot a basketball?
Mother: You do just what they're doing. Throw it in
there. That's all.
Child: I thought they called it throwing, not shoot.
Mother: Nah, they call it shooting.
Child: I call it throwing.
Mother: Shooting baskets.
Child: Ma, they'll think you was-- You don't have the
basket.
Mother: I promise you they'll know what you're talking
about. Two words. Shooting. Baskets. Start over
here. Put the S.
Child: It's not ball? (Child B, Tape 4/18/91)
Although the teacher was sensitive to some of the
impediments described earlier, she seemed unaware of the
discrepancies in perceived objectives and attributed the failure
of parents to complete the homework with their children to a lack
of commitment:
So when you send something home and they still don't do
anything, you know they--they're not really looking for
anything to do with them (Teacher, Interview 6/20/91)
She felt that one way of increasing their involvement would have
been to "keep the pressure on" the way she had been able to do
when teaching preschool where she saw the parents on a daily
basis instead of twice a year for conferences. While she
objected to the parents doing the homework "just to get
stickers," the teacher admitted that she did remind the children
"every once in awhile, bring your homework back because I'm
putting the stickers up so I'll know who's brought it back," and
that she herself had been susceptible to such extrinsic forms of
motivation when, as a preschool teacher, she had pressed the
issue of homework more because the record of returned homework
assignments had to be sent "downtown" [school administration
offices] (Interview, Teacher, 6/20/91).
Discussion
These findings suggest that neither the number of
assignments returned nor the amount of time parents report
spending with their children can support inferences about degree
of parental commitment or the effectiveness of parental
involvement in meeting school goals. This qualitative
examination of the process of completing that homework suggests
that families construct their own meanings for school generated
tasks, that these meanings determine whether and how the families
approach the activities, and that the kindergarten children play
an active part in the process. Perhaps, if the homework were
more integrally related to the classroom curriculum, and if that
curriculum reflected the children's experiences outside of
school, the children as well as their families would be empowered
in their efforts to construct meaning. Furthermore, the
relationship between home and school in this endeavor might be
viewed as reciprocal, with homework providing support for family
closeness and feelings of efficacy as well as a mechanism for
families to support children's school success. For the child
whose mother worked at one, making a college instead of a collage
might well have been a serendipitous way of accomplishing these
aims.
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