11 Plus Exams Forum

DD1 is now in Yr 10, (not sure where the past 3 years have gone?!) and their timetable includes free periods for the first time. However, she uses them for completing homework, which to me seems like she is actually doing less, and not as I expected, a whole lot more! When I have challenged her on this, she says all her friends use them for homework.
Free-periods are not something I ever had back in the day, but then we are talking a good 30 years ago or so! So what is the purpose of this free period? I understand that when exam time approaches, they may prove invaluable, but right now, all they seem to be providing for DD, is extra face-time with her friends in the evening?! What do others think?

Extra time with friends in the evening sounds brilliant to me!

DD is now in Year 13 and has lots of free periods deliberately scheduled in the timetable. They are generally used for study, though there's the occasional trip to the coffee shop in town for a little downtime with friends.

I'd certainly be tempted to encourage anything that allows time for relaxing in the evenings as the pressure of GCSEs/A levels/university/40-hour working week will kick in soon enough.

What would you like her to be doing in her free periods?

Free periods in Year 10? Wow, my dd would have killed for that, her school only has them from lower sixth onwards.

Amber wrote:What would you like her to be doing in her free periods?

Well exactly...

We hardly see either of ours at the moment (Y10 and 12), they both disappear off to their rooms as soon as they get in, appearing only briefly for meals, and I'm pretty certain they're both mostly doing homework rather than just being left to their own devices ( sorry, very bad pun ). Both spend almost the whole weekend the same way. Anything that reduced that time would be a good thing imho but son's free periods are rather unhelpfully an entire Monday morning every fortnight (I sincerely hope he's not leaving homework until Monday morning ) and iirc the Tuesday afternoon of the intervening week - still too early in the week to have accumulated much work. I would hope both would be taking any opportunity to reduce the homework load.

I'm not sure I would want to dictate what she should do in her free periods, I'm just surprised that if anything, she has started off Yr10, on a rather more relaxed note than I expected. I guess I would have thought they might be useful for consolidating some of the work she has already done, or going over some of her weaker subjects like the unmentionable maths. She has always spent the minimum time possible on her homework, and now that she is squeezing it into her free periods, she's spending even less! But like you say, I guess it will all kick off soon enough...time will tell!