Homework - Happy Muslim Mama Style

Homework is often a fraught affair in our home.  I started telling Little Lady to do it on Saturday morning and we are still working on the same page by Sunday evening.  This weekend though we had fun with homework and broke some of the usual rules:

Stay off mum's bed (they never took any notice of that one anyway): 

Stick to A4:

In fact homework should always be inside an exercise book:

Little Lady had to draw two place value diagrams for her homework.  She drew her inspiration from the bunting we make for special occasions, letting loose with my guillotine and the fabulous coloured paper a friend sent me from America.  For the smaller version she used ricrac for a washing line and clothes from a paper dolls book to represent the tens, units, hundreds etc (the handbag in the first picture and the flower in the second are the decimal points).

It never fails to amaze me how entirely different my kid are.  Little Lady is creative and loves to read and write, whereas maths is her mortal enemy and we have to work extra hard at it, with her getting annoyed and wanting to be left alone.  Little Man loves homework and will complete the whole lot in one go with minimal explanation or help, but lots of encouragement.  He finds the maths homework easy and picks things up first time round, but when asked to do a creative exercise often finds himself totally stumped.

These guys have taught me so much about being flexible and adapting to childrens different learning styles to get the best out of them whether that be finding a physical element to the task (Gorgeous), turning it into play and through stories (Little Lady) or working through methodically and in all seriousness (Little Man)