#1 Tip for Helping Your Students Time Block Their Homework

Executive FunctioningHelping My Child At Home

May 22

Use this strategy to help students time-block their work!

We hope you are enjoying our theme of the month - Executive Functioning! This week we want to turn our focus to time blocking. This is a concept that a lot of us educators are already familiar with (you have your literacy block, math, lunch, etc.) but did you know that you can change a child's educational outlook with time-blocking too?

One of the most common things we hear when families are looking for Learning Evaluations for their children is that "homework takes forever." This is a tell-tale sign that the child might be struggling somewhere academically.

This could be attention, dyslexia, or a number of other learning disabilities. While it probably doesn't actually take "forever" to complete the assignment, there is a point where your child may be spending too much time on homework.

Tip for Helping Your Students Time Block Their Homework

The rule we always tell our families is that homework should take 10 minutes per grade level. If you have a second grader, they should be spending 20 minutes on homework. If you have an 8th grader, it should be 80 minutes.

As a teacher, you rarely see the students completing their homework. However, if you can provide families with this information, it can help them understand if their child is struggling much earlier on. If you are teaching third grade (where kids should spend about 30 minutes on homework every night) but you have a family who says that it is taking them 90 minutes to get through it, please pass this information along.

By giving your students' families this homework time-blocking information, they will be more aware of how long their child should be spending on assignments each night. While spending too much time on homework itself is not enough to diagnose a learning disability, the parents need to know that it is a valid concern. There could be an academic struggle that is impacting how long it takes the student to complete their homework.

Want to take these strategies further?

Check out our Spotlight PD: Supporting Executive Functioning Through the Grade Levels.
This 1-hour on-demand training gives you a clear, practical framework to support attention, planning, regulation, and goal-setting from kindergarten through high school.

Executive functioning is one of the most talked-about topics in education right now, but most educators are asked to support EF skills without ever being shown how.

This training changes that.

You’ll get a simple 5-step framework, real examples from K–12 classrooms, and ready-to-use tools you can implement right away, without needing a separate curriculum or a total schedule overhaul.