DS has fine motor issues and anything to do with cutting and pasting is pure torture for him. He spends hours cutting up the shapes for his math homework and 3 seconds figuring out the actual answer.

I keep telling him it's good practice for him - the cutting, not the math!

Sigh.

Anonymous wrote:It's the 2nd week of school..... It's an assignment your kid can do on his own with glue, tape, images cut from magazines, whatever. Why get worked up about it?

No doubt! I don't know how OP got this far (child in 5th grade) without accepting this as a typical first week assignment?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid had to do this last year in 4th grade. He used pics (of him & things he liked) that we printed & taped with packing tape. And of course - he brought it home at the end of the year with 3 pages used! Waste of time is right.

So true!! We have stacks of virtually unused composition books from years past. A few pages used, then nothing. Why do the teachers ask for them?

Why aren't you re-using them the next year??? I cut out the pages that have been used (which is often 20 pages) and then send them back in the next year. We aren't poor. We can afford to buy brand new each year -- but why would I do that if at least half of the comp book is unused? REDUCE, RE-USE, and only then, recycle.

It's the 2nd week of school..... It's an assignment your kid can do on his own with glue, tape, images cut from magazines, whatever. Why get worked up about it?

Anonymous wrote:I love parents who second-guess every little thing that schools do. Not! This kind of complaining = too much time on your hands.

This kind of assignment = not enough substance in the curriculum.

I love parents who second-guess every little thing that schools do. Not! This kind of complaining = too much time on your hands.

3rd grade teacher here. I asked my students to decorate their writer's notebook with photos of things that were special to them. It is a lesson in the writing program we use. The purpose is to help foster a love of writing and make them feel like their journal is special and unique to them. The photos also give them some inspiration of what to write about when they are stuck.

Anonymous wrote:If you guys hate how the teachers do things then show up a school board meetings, volunteer at the school, etc. instead of whining about it on DCUM!

Ever thought that maybe we do all of that already?

Anonymous wrote:My kid had to do this last year in 4th grade. He used pics (of him & things he liked) that we printed & taped with packing tape. And of course - he brought it home at the end of the year with 3 pages used! Waste of time is right.

So true!! We have stacks of virtually unused composition books from years past. A few pages used, then nothing. Why do the teachers ask for them?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They just want the books to get covered- they last longer that way. I had the same assignments in school in the dark ages of the 1970's. Don't you have a box of markers and a brown paper bag from the grocery store in your house? Voila.

Sounds like it's their notebooks, not the textbooks.

I can't believe people are defending this one. I'd feel the same way you do, op. Isn't this why notebooks come in different colors? I'd put a couple of stamps on and call it done, but that's me

OP here; thank you, that's exactly what I was talking about. And we bought composition books in different colors, patterns, etc. so they could be differentiated. No need for some kindergarten decorating exercise.

Anonymous wrote:They just want the books to get covered- they last longer that way. I had the same assignments in school in the dark ages of the 1970's. Don't you have a box of markers and a brown paper bag from the grocery store in your house? Voila.

No, these aren't textbooks we're talking about. They are composition notebooks, used as journals. The assignment was exactly this: Decorate your notebooks with stickers and pictures that reflect you and your interests!" Yay!! (I added that last part myself).

When I was a 6th grade teacher we had students personalize their writers' notebooks with photos, drawings, whatever. Students had several days to complete the assignment and their first writing assignment was to write a paragraph explaining the significance behind one of the images on the notebook.

My first year I thought it was a stupid assignment too, but all the other teachers were doing it so I did too. I did realize that it helped me get to know the students a little bit (and them to know me since I made/shared my own notebook as a model), as well as to quickly identify whose notebook was whose.

More importantly, after the images served as inspiration for writing topics when kids had writers block (especially during the memoir unit - don't know what to write about, pick something from the cover of your notebook). The first entry was also a quick wAy to assess the students' writing skills - did they write one sentence or a real, coherent paragraph? Was it riddled with spelling errors?

I tend to agree with PPs that there was probably more to the assignment than slapping some stickers on a notebook.

Posters suck.

A hoop jumping assignment like this that takes 10 minutes is mildly annoying at most. I wouldn't bother getting more worked up about it than that though.

Some kids find this sort of thing fun. It could make doing the work for those subjects in their special notebook more meaningful to the kid.

Or, your kid might hate it and think it's pointless. In which case it's still a good lesson for life. You won't always understand the point of everything your teacher/parent/boss requires but you still have to do it, take pride in it, and do it within the appropriate timeframe.

At least this assignment can be made fun. And you will eventually have bigger issues to worry about so I would not waste my mental energy being upset about this and I would definitely not try to complain to the teacher or something.

Actually, I'm all for this kind of "homework" -- too bad it only happens once a year!