I have been thinking about this lately too. DS5 had a full grade skip and started first this year, but he is doing work several grade levels above that. So for spelling he has different things each night. Monday - 3x each, T - write half the words in a sentence, W - write the other half in a sentence, Th - write in ABC order and "study" (sorry I couldn't resist the quote because he has yet to ever study anything). He has harder words...sometimes words that are even up to 9 letters and such. Last night he had this work and he also has math most nights. His teacher has printed out a bunch of great math sheets and he can pick which ones to do. Last night he picked a sheet with math pyramids which was really cool...but it took a while as they were really big pyramids and the numbers got up to the 600's at times. He did 4 pyramids but it took him like 20 minutes. His spelling took him 30 minutes to write 30 words. Now let me just say he was completely distracted. He was drawing doodles and coming in to tell me that one of his words was a palindrome, and then telling me that he calculated that the 27th word would go below the line and wouldn't be able to fit on the page, etc. etc. So...overall his homework took like an hour. He is only 5, that seems a bit much for me. And tonight he is going to have to come up with sentences for words that are kind of hard to put in sentences and involve lots of writing (basil, agent, radar, etc.) I am thinking that if I time him and give him like 15 minutes he will get it done. I don't want him to be working on it all night. I am very excited that the school has given him differentiation and is doing so well with him. And he loved doing the math pyramids last night, it wasn't like it was really "work" for him.
any thoughts?
