Homework Time

The school holidays are drawing to a close which means that for me, life gets very busy again very soon. One of the things we've found difficult over the past 2.5 years that E has been getting homework is the organising of the supplies.
Even though I preach to parents at school about the need for a good consistent daily homework routine I don't always achieve that with E. Part of the reason is that he is coping very well with his school work and can race through his homework fairly easily at this stage so it is pretty easy to just do the written stuff on a Monday and then hurriedly finish filling out the reading log on a Thursday night. E doesn't read to us at night anymore because he's well and truly into chapter books. Now that I've done the First Steps Reading In-Service at school I can see a need for him to read more complex texts to me and that is something else I am going to work on. Another reason that we dont stop and do table top tasks every day is the actual table. A few years ago we hada table that seated four and always stayed fairly clear because it had to. Now we have a table that seats six and one end is always covered with "stuff" including stray pens, pencils, erasers, scissors and all the things possibly needed for homework.
One of the points raised in the parent teacher interview for D was that he needs to practice forming his numbers and letters before he needs to put more of his thinking on paper when he starts Year 1 next year. I though being able to find a pencil and an eraser wasa good start!
So I wanted all the supplies in one spot and I wanted plenty of them. I already had a basket but it was in great disarray with everything everywhere so I dumped it all out and started again with some extra supplies we bought with our groceries today.
The final photo is a closer peek into our basket where we've got good supplies of glue, sticky tape and scissors and a laminated card with Queensland Beginners Alphabet for D and a Macquarie personal dictionary which E used at school in year 1 and 2 and I continue to use with him now at home.
So we're all organised and will now have to work on our weekly routine so that there is a bit of time spent around the homework table every night if possible.