j.j I teach lower elementary so it hasn't felt super necessary but I'm worried they might complain. I think I'll give out some fun reinforcement activities for class points and not for grade credit. Esp. since a lot of my kids don't have much support at home so it doesn't seem fair.
Plus they're in class for 7 hours a day! Let them have a break and a chance to be kids.
Not-for-credit homework is the way to go IMO. Kids that don't have stable home lives shouldn't be punished with work they are unlikely to be able to complete. Not to mention that it's good to normalize the work day being over when you're off the clock.
For real! My heart broke a bit last year when a kid told me "I read the [thing] to my cat because no one else wanted to listen to me."
And on the other hand there was this one kid who was a god at Qu'uran recitation (he would do it as a distraction strategy is how I know) but he needed to work on his phonics skills a lot who would memorize our little readers that we would send home by having his mom read it to him so he wouldn't have to develop his decoding skills in class. So happy for mans but we had to ban him from supplemental work because it was harming his growth.