I have fourth grader and we (mostly my wife) not only read all of my child's home work but we discuss it with her to make sure she understands it and to see if we can expand it. We make a concentrated to effort to expose her to art and other ways of thinking. Our family vacation this was DC and we spent most of time in museums, she wants to go back and do it again. If the school closed tomorrow my daughter would still get an education.

My daughter's school has a contest where kids read books and test on them to get points based on the how difficult the box and how long it is. So read the Hobbit and you can get 16 points read War and Peace and you get 118. The goal for the students is 100 points. Second place was 425 points and my daughter won with 756. Other parents ask how we get her to read so much and seem a little offended when we tell them we simply turn off the TV and limit her to one hour a day of screen time. One mom actually told us that only an hour of TV sounded a little extreme. She thinks kids are over stressed already and needed more down time.