The word ‘holidays’ brings lots of smiles to students’ faces. But at the same time, their teachers are thinking about what homework to give them during holidays. The purpose is to help them stay busy and not lose touch with their studies. Although giving homework during school holidays is not at all considered wrong and is never criticised by any of the teachers, still bombarding students with it keeps them from enjoying their days off while creating a lack of interest for studies.

Break from regular work is necessary as it increases efficiency. One, among the several purposes of holidays or vacations, is to provide the students some relaxation after heavy and lengthy work load, peer pressure and bullying. Over-studying and over-schooling has its own harms and can effect adversely while causing many disorders. But what good will holidays do for the students if they are filled with extensive rote learning and exhausting homework which will serve no other purpose except for making the students sick and tired of the workload.

This is a common phenomenon that is followed by almost every school and every teacher. The teachers usually give students homework that is more like revision of work completed by them before the holidays so that the students can be tested on it once they come back from their holidays. This not only makes studies boring for them, it also proves to be fruitless.

Instead, if the students are given some exciting tasks which do not require them to remain restricted to their textbooks and have some practical connection with their real life, they will surely enjoy the task while also learn to adapt to the knowledge in their day-to-day life.

To give some examples, the teachers might give their students various experiments to perform for science. For social studies the students can be given a survey work in which they can interview their neighbours to know of the major problems faced by the people of their area and suggest some solutions to those problems. For mathematics they can be asked to construct a cube the size of their bag or a building using various angles, shapes and sizes.

There can be numerous examples in which the students don’t need to use textbooks all the time for completing their work and can learn to use their knowledge in a better way. This approach of giving homework to the students can prove more beneficial as it requires to utilise the knowledge gained by them during their regular classes. Giving homework to the students in which they have to do nothing more than rote learning without applying any knowledge is just like learning to fly a plane theoretically and not giving the pilot a chance actually fly the plane.

It should be kept in mind that holidays are not to burden the students with lengthy homework but to let them come back to school with fresh minds so that they may have the energy and will to study even better than before.

Therefore the teachers before giving any homework for the holidays or vacations should properly plan suitable activities which will enhance the cognitive skills of their students and can also be enjoyed by them. If the activities are interesting the students would automatically come and share their exciting experiences and will be thrilled by the wonders they have performed during the time they were away from their school.