We have a family that wants to take their children back to the family's home country in Asia around Christmas. The kids will miss two weeks of school on top of our normal vacation. How much time off from school are your students allowed to take for something like this?
This happens all the time at my school. In fact, between vacations and sickness, I have not had my entire class in the room more than 3 days this year! I quit fighting it and just send some reading material along, hoping they will keep the child reading daily. I will not send homework along, as experience has told me they do not do it after all my work of getting it prepared. Plus, vacation is vacation. I pile up the make up work and they do a few pages a day when they get back. I do get annoyed that parents think I can whip out 2 weeks of work the day before they leave or even a week before they leave. I don't know what we are going to cover when they are gone - I plan on weekends, and leave openings for things that come up during the week. Maybe writing a sentence will take a week, maybe more or less. Maybe addition will take 2 days or 2 weeks. It is an annoyance, but I figure they are getting a different kind of education through the travel and experiences with their families.
Another idea is to have the student prepare a presentation for when they return to school. The presentation could teach everyone else about the country they visited. I have done this and it has been a wonderful experience for all!
I don't know how much is "allowed," but I've had it happen before and I'm fully supportive. Connecting with family and their culture is important. When you have to travel that far, you're not going to go for just a week. I do not prepare work, however. I tell them to write in a journal and share it with the class when they return.
This is quite common in my school as well. One of my grade 7 students in leaving the first week in December and will be back mid-January. We've known about it for well over a month already, and are putting together some things for her to work on. I think that if the students are gone for more than 2 weeks we need to take them off of our active roster and then re-register them when they return, but that isn't too much of a difficulty.
This happens all the time in my school and there is nothing we can do about it. I ask the child, fifth grade, to report to the class on his/her experience and assign a buddy who will work with the child to keep them up to date on what they missed while they were away. It may also be necessary to spend a few extra period reviewing what was missed ,especially in math. Don't worry about it,it very rarely proves to be a problem.
When the students return, we catch them up as much as we can. If they miss entire units in math or science, for example, we are able to indicate on the report card that the student was absent during that unit of study.
In our district, given enough notice, we prepare a work study contract. If completed by the student they get credit and the district gets attendance credit for the days off so it is a win-win. My kids have done this twice - visiting their grandparents in Australia - during our summer is their winter and just not as enjoyable as when you can go to the beach and avoid the rainy times.
I really hate the whole "pull them out to see Disney when it's cheaper and uncrowded" thing. But I think this is different. Seeing family, especially family half way around the world, is important. That said: I cannot see how it can possibly keep from hurting a student's education. I don't care whose notes you get, it's NOT the same thing as being in my class!!! Kids who return after having mono- which of course is extended absence but not by choice- inevitably struggle afterwards for quite some time. There's no way that a journal or some worksheets can possibly compensate for missing 10 days of classes.
We'd have some who miss that many days due to illness alone! Some of the students do have a hard time after extended absences, but many are able to do quite well; most of our families who are away visiting family overseas take education very seriously. Some of our students even attend school on a casual basis when they are away. The ones I have a problem with, like Alice, are those who take advantage of the "off-season" prices for Disney, Mexica or a cruise.
The experiences children gain from trips like these IMO far out way the slight disadvantage of missing two weeks of school. If the student already struggles, I might suggest a tutor to help them catch up. We did have a dad who wanted to take his son to Mexico for 2 months. We tried to discourage this by telling him, he would have to unenroll his son from our school and when he came back, he might get overflowed to another elementary. Dad decided to let the student stay at our school.
I agree that trips to Disney and trips to Asia are quite different. I would support the family- hopefully they realize that there will be work waiting for when they get back. We send the kids with a little booklet/journal to write in about their trip- one page for each day. We don't send reading homework- we just ask parents to read with the child while they are gone. Math homework is usually waiting for them when they get back or we send as much as we can beforehand. I teach first grade, though, so it is different from older grades that have more difficult content.
I teach in a rural school, so this doesn't happen often. Although the local Ntl Guard is about to do one of it's largest deployments ever (almost 3,000) and many of our students are being affected. Some are leaving for a few weeks until a family member can come stay with them (several kids have both parents deploying - I didn't think they did that), some are leaving for the length of the deployment). When it's an extended time that the child will miss, my principal or super. has to approve me giving them the work. As many have said, there's no way to match what we are doing, and I don't try. I tell them the topics we are covering, the pages (if possible) in the textbook, and send as much as possible with them. I've only had a few kids leave for several weeks and they each did every bit of the work that I sent, and one did much more. It turned out not to be a problem. To be fair, though, all were very strong students with strong parental support.
I have it happen a lot. I usually do prepare most of the work we do-and they have all brought it back. It's frustrating though, because sometimes it's hard to plan out how much you will get through. I had one kid miss 2-3 weeks towards the beginning of the school year. It was hard to get him back into the routine and have his work completed to my expectations after he missed so much school. In our district you're supposed to be held back if you miss a certain amount of days. But all parents have to do is show up at the District Office to fight it, and they will let it go.
I have a student who will miss a month in January - February. Mom wants me to email her the assignments daily and provide feedback so her child can keep up with the class. While I'm willing to prepare some assignments, I can't be emailing back and forth each day. She said that the teacher at his school last year was able to do this for her and she's expecting me to do the same. Has anyone had this situation?
