For our family, hw in 4th-5th grade was all about establishing a routine of recognizing and fulfilling expectations. For ds (now in 9th grade) especially, who has a certain, um, rigidity in his mindset, I believe this was a really important. The hw consisted of a half page math worksheet. Every. Single. Day. It took 5-10 minutes to do, tops.
That sounds like a useful routine. Was the worksheet something the teacher gave all the kids, or something special for your DS? Was it the teacher's idea, or yours?
The short worksheets were the teacher's idea. She had a repository of them - I forget the source. It was a 4th-5th class and our kids got the hw all through 4th and most of 5th, until she ran out of them. I suspect (but don't know) that at least most of the kids got some math hw, but I would guess the worksheets were different for different kids. (It is a long story, but for a variety of reasons, that was the one case where we experienced a classroom where in class differentiation worked -- I would guess there were kids from the 1st %ile to the 99th+ %ile in math achievement.)
