homework story

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Free social stories about homework, study skills, & tests.

The other day it occurred to me that my kids probably don't really know how to study for a test simply because no one has specifically taught them or shown them how. 

Well, that and there hasn't really been a reason to really study for them yet. But as my oldest approaches high school, this skill set will become more important.

So, quite recently we talked about different ways to study. I showed my kids some different ways they could review their notes and how they could test their knowledge themselves in little ways. That kind of thing.

But I thought it would be helpful to look for some free social stories about homework, study skills, and taking a test  to supplement as needed. And in case someone else might be in the same boat, trying to help their kids learn how to study.

Below you will find a variety of social stories about taking tests, what homework is, cheating and plagiarism, taking notes, writing a research paper or essay, and more. Hopefully you find these helpful!

Free Social Stories About Homework, Study Skills, & Tests

Have you been looking for a social story about doing homework or a social story about test anxiety? Then look no further than these free printable study skills social stories. Some require you to have a Teachers Pay Teachers account (which is free!) before you can download them.

I've rounded up some options for you to explore. That way you find the best homework related social story for yourself or your child. Or you can simply use ideas from different stories below to write your own custom story (free social story templates here to help).

Please note that just because a social story is listed here does not mean I endorse its content. After all, many social stories tend to be poorly written and/or teach autistic masking. Besides, I haven't read all of these stories word for word myself. So please read through the stories carefully before using them.

1. 4 Homework Social Stories from Happy Learners - There are four text-only social stories here about doing homework. No images are included with these stories. The topics include what is homework, why you have to do homework, finding a routine for doing school work at home, and how to keep track of assignments and their due dates.

2. Social Story About Taking Tests at School from Social Stories: Power Tool for Autism - This story includes two clipart images. Otherwise, it's primarily text only. It talks about some test taking rules.

3. Cheating Social Story from Watson Institute - There are lots of stories here, but scroll down until you find the cheating one. It talks about test taking, asking for help, and what cheating is. It uses colorful clipart.

4. Social Stories for Tests & Homework from Watson Institute - There are a number of stories here. One topic that I'm glad to see here is "Sometimes Kids Don't Get 100%" as I know many kids struggle with that.

5. Completing School Work & Assignments Social Stories from Watson Institute - You'll find lots of relevant stories here. Topics include: completing assignments, completing school work, how to start work by myself, and completing work independently.

6. Doing Homework Social Story from Meghan Brice on TPT - This story comes as a PowerPoint so you should be able to edit it. It uses a mix of photos and clipart.

7. Taking a Test Social Story from Mathnolia on TPT - This story looks like it does a good job of explaining what a test is and the different types of tests a child might encounter. It appears to use primarily clipart.

8. Social Story About Taking Exams from Centre for Autism Middletown - Scroll to the bottom and you'll find a one page social story about taking exams. It includes one photo.

9. Avoiding Plagiarism Checklist from Laura Torres on TPT - Okay, it's not technically a social story. However, it's a great checklist for helping kids avoid plagiarism. It would be a great visual to have handy while doing homework or research papers.

Video Social Stories About Study Skills, Note Taking, & More

Here are some video social stories that talk about different aspects of homework, taking tests, and other relevant study skills. You can use these in teletherapy sessions, social skills groups, at home, and/or classroom settings. Videos are always a great alternative to printing off a story.

Like the stories above, some of the wording in these videos aren't always great. But I wanted to make sure you had lots of different options for helping yourself or your child understand different aspects of study skills and completing homework. Remember, many of these videos are geared towards different age groups.

I was surprised by how many free social stories about homework (and related study skills!) are actually out there. Hopefully you'll find one or two that will be useful for your needs.

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"Charlieeeeeeee, do your homework now!" Wow, his mother was really bellowing at him . Charlie thought, "Well, she doesn't have to do it. It's so boring", and he spent hours with his books, hoping that time would pass and it would soon be time for supper . As usual, he was lying on his bed, busy staring at the ceiling, daydreaming. Suddenly some little elves, no more than a centimetre tall , appeared by the window.

"Good evening, young man, will you please give us your homework so we can play with it?", asked one of the elves, politely.

Charlie laughed.

"How are you lot going to play with homework? It's the most boring stuff there is! Ha, ha, ha... Go on, take it. You can play with it as long as you like" .

Charlie watched his guests, and was so surprised to see what they did. In less than a minute, they had formed teams and were busy playing with the pen, the eraser, the book, and the pad of paper. Very strange stuff they were getting up to . Like with the sums, instead of moving the pen across the paper, they would hold the pen still and move the paper instead. Or like how they had races to see who could do the sums fastest. And then they all dressed up as either Father Christmas, a Halloween pumpkin, or a bag of cheese. And whenever the clock was stopped , the elf who was in the lead got to draw himself in the notepad.

So the pad ended up full of Santas and pumpkins. They were also really funny while learning to read. They used well-known songs, and had to learn the words to them . When they had done that they put on a big concert to sing those songs. Charlie really enjoyed watching those little students, he even joined in with the singing. And time passed so quickly, that suddenly his mother was calling him for supper.

"Aww, what a pain! This is so much fun..." he groaned, as he got up to go to supper. "Of course it's fun! I already told you. Why don't you try it for a few days yourself? We'll all come back to see you again from time to time".

"Deal!" agreed Charlie.

So, every evening, Charlie started playing with his homework , inventing new and crazier ways to make it more fun. He would dress up, sing loads of songs, and do all manner of other things too. Now and again, his elf friends would turn up, although the truth was that he wasn't sure whether they really had come through the window or from out of his own imagination .

Neither Charlie's parents, nor his teachers, nor anyone in the whole school could understand the great change in him. From that day on, not only did he spend a lot more time doing homework , he did it perfectly, and accompanied with lots of drawings. He was very happy, and was always singing. His mother told him how proud she was at seeing him work so hard , especially at something she knew he found boring. But Charlie said to himself, "Well, she doesn't have to do it. It's fun!"

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The story of numbskull tom, the treasure hunter ,  a story about studying and reading, topics in this story.

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“I can’t do it,” George groaned, and brought his forehead to rest on the block of lined paper in front of him.

“Can’t do what?” I asked, looking up from peeling the carrots for the evening meal. I work from home, so I’m around when George gets in from school. He sits at the kitchen table, and I bring him some milk in his Manchester United mug and a plate with a teatime snack. This might be a slice of toast and honey with a peeled satsuma from which I have removed any stray threads of pith, or perhaps an apple, cored and cut into fine slices, with a few cubes of Cheddar.

Quite often I’m not able to stop what I’m doing, and then I have to stay put. I call out from my desk to say hello when I hear the front door. He calls hello back and makes his way to the television. I’d rather catch up on work in the evening, but I don’t always have a choice.

“Can’t do what?” I repeated. “I’m sure you can.”

“You don’t know . Everybody says it’s really hard. And now I’ve got to give it in for tomorrow.”

“Why do you do this? Why do you leave it to the last minute?”

That’s another wonderful thing about George—you can tell him off and he won’t immediately go into orbit like some I could mention. He’s not a great one for flying off the handle.

“It’s just so hard,” he moaned.

“Now, come on,” I said, drying my hands and patting his nice strong shoulder. “Sit up and tell me what it is. You never know, I might be able to help.”

“It’s Mr. Mottram,” he said, heaving himself up from his slump. “It’s English, so it should be all right, but he still wants to make it hard. We’ve got to do three sides of paper out of our own heads.”

George is already taller than me and can lift me off the ground. One or two of his friends have had their growth spurts, so that I find myself deferring to the sudden height and booming voice of a boy whom last year I knew as a clear-skinned little pipsqueak.

“What is it, this terrible task he’s set you?”

“ ‘Write About an Event That Changed Your Life,’ ” George said with mournful sarcasm. “ That’s what it is.”

“Three pages is a lot.” Then a thought occurred to me. “You’ve had all the Easter holidays to do this, haven’t you? And you just didn’t let on about it. Now it’s your first week back and the chickens have come home to roost.”

“I know,” he said, spreading his hands palms upward in front of him. “There’s no excuse.”

“What have your friends done?”

“Dylan’s written about when he went to a football match with his uncle, Crystal Palace versus Queens Park Rangers, and realized Crystal Palace was the team he wanted to follow for the rest of his life.”

“I can’t see how he filled three sides of paper with that.”

“He said it only took up one page even in big writing,” George said. “Now he’s got to, you know, pad it out. He’s going to describe all the Crystal Palace matches he’s been to since then, one at a time.”

Serves Mr. Mottram right, I thought; I don’t know what he can be expecting from a class of thirteen-year-olds. They can’t know what a life-changing event is at their age. How can they know if what happened to them last year will have changed them in twenty years’ time? They won’t know till they get there.

“I shouldn’t really help you,” I said. “I should leave you to get on with it. But if I do . . .”

“Yes?” George said, propped up on his elbows, eying me with wary optimism.

“ If I help you, you’ve got to understand it’s only this once.”

“Course,” he said with a beaming smile of relief. “You know I’m not like that, Mum.”

“Yes.” I smiled back. “I do know. I trust you.”

“ ’Cause you can,” he said, shrugging.

“All right then, let’s think.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and watched him assume a thoughtful expression. He furrowed his brow and chewed at the end of his Biro, then caught my eye and started to giggle.

“I’d rather write about anything else in the world,” he complained.

“Just think,” I said. “In fifty years’ time you might really want to write about the Event That Changed Your Life. In your old age you might find you’re desperate to set down your memories. Look at Grandma.”

My mother had recently filled half a red Silvine exercise book with startlingly deadpan revelations. Her father had, at the age of fourteen, rejected a future as a farm laborer and walked down from Wakefield to London to find work; at first he slept wrapped in old newspaper on benches along the Embankment. That was before he went to fight in France. His father had been, among other things, a prizefighter at country fairs, more or less on the wrong side of the law all his life.

“No,” George said, shaking his head firmly. “ Boring .”

“You might find it interesting when you get older,” I persisted. “I never knew that her mother, your great-grandmother, was found as a newborn baby wrapped in a flour sack on the church steps early one Sunday morning. That accounts for a lot.”

I’m glad I wasn’t born at a time when you had to stay with the father of your children even if he broke your jaw.

“Where was I born?” asked George, who knew perfectly well.

“Willesden General,” I said. “Then I kept you beside me in a basket all the time for months and months. You were a lovely mild baby, like a dewdrop.”

George smiled a gratified smile. “But I did cry sometimes,” he prompted.

“Yes, but when you cried it just made me laugh,” I said. “You didn’t wail in a high-pitched way; no, it was more like the roar of a lion, and then only when you wanted milk. When you were hungry, you just roared!”

He smirked at this and gave an illustrative growl.

Following his birth, I’d had an urge to find out more about my family tree. After a while I gave up. It had branches and twigs and leaves in every corner of the British Isles. There were shipwrights and ropemakers in Northumberland, laborers in Lincolnshire, watchmen and peddlers and blacksmiths from Ipswich and Barnstaple and Carlisle. The further back I went, the further afield they spread out. It seemed pointless. George was from all over the place.

“Life-changing events,” I said, returning to the business in hand. “Let’s think of some examples.”

“If you win the lottery,” George suggested.

“Or lose all your money,” I said. “Go bankrupt like Dad’s dad. Skip the country like my uncle Colin.”

“Yes,” George said, pen poised, looking less hopeful.

“What would change the life of a thirteen-year-old, though? That’s the question,” I reminded myself. “The death of a parent, certainly, but I don’t want you writing about that because it might bring bad luck.”

“Jacob’s mother died,” George commented. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“No,” I said. “Poor Jacob. What did she die of?”

“He says cancer. But Ranjit told me it wasn’t that, it was a bottle of tablets.” George shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“No,” I said again. Jacob would get by till middle age, probably, when he would step onto this death as onto the tines of a garden fork, and the solid shaft of the handle would rear up and hit him in the face.

“So, not death,” I said. “Because that’s the obvious one. No, it’ll have to be your parents’ divorce.”

“But you’re not divorced.”

“Well, we are in this story.”

“He’ll think it’s really true,” George said, looking worried.

“So?” I said. “It’ll fill three sides of paper. Let’s have the mum leaving the dad for a change, rather than the other way around. And you have to move from your family house to a flat, and your new bedroom is tiny and you have to share it with your little brother, who drives you mad.”

“I haven’t got a little brother.”

“Mr. Mottram doesn’t know that.”

My siblings are scattered far and wide. Sharon runs a bed-and-breakfast up by Hadrian’s Wall. Valerie has an alpha-male job in the City, just like her husband, and they live in a big house in Wimbledon. Keith has had various irons in the fire over the years, but now he’s teaching English as a foreign language in China. Very modern Britain, our family.

George looked at me warily. I could see that he was torn between his natural fantasy-hating honesty and a desire to have someone else do his homework.

“Is it allowed?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s English, isn’t it? Don’t they call this bit creative writing? Well, you’re just being creative.”

“Ha,” George said.

“Inventive,” I added. “It’s a good thing. Listen, you want to watch the match tonight, don’t you? Chelsea versus Liverpool, isn’t it?”

“In which case you’d better get this homework finished before dinner. Which I’m doing specially for seven o’clock, because I know you like all that warmup chat beforehand.”

“Thanks, Mum.”

I couldn’t resist giving him a hug, the roaring dewdrop baby who had grown into this broad-shouldered boy. Last week I’d been making flapjacks while he stood by to lick the spoon, and I mentioned that I’d always liked the picture of the lion on the Golden Syrup tin. “Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” he read aloud, peering at the green-and-gold picture. “That’s what’s written underneath it.” I never knew that before.

“Have you got your pen ready? I’m not going to write this for you, you know; I’m only going to give you ideas.”

“O.K.,” he agreed. He was in no position to object.

“Your parents had been having arguments for years. You remember the slammed doors and bitter words from when you were little,” I began.

George started to write.

“You tried to blot it out, but you couldn’t help feeling upset inside. It got into your dreams. You could put a bad dream in, George; that would take up a few lines.”

“What about?”

“Oh, an earthquake perhaps,” I said. “I was always dreaming about earthquakes and floods and fires when I was your age. Or you’re in a house and it falls down around you and you try to run, but the ground opens up in front of you.”

“To pad it out a bit?” George said.

“If you like. Then there’s the divorce, which is a relief after all the fighting.”

“Why did Auntie Sharon get divorced?”

“I don’t know,” I said, tutting. “They seemed quite happy to start with, but then Mike turned into a bear with a sore head when she had the twins. Some people find domestic life more of a trial than others.”

“Dad loves domestic,” George commented. “On Fridays when he gets back home, he says, ‘Ah, domestic bliss.’ ”

“Yes, well,” I said with a stunted smile.

“Auntie Sharon lives in the nicest place, and she’s got three dogs, but Auntie Valerie’s got the best job,” George said. “Her family goes on the best holidays, and they’ve got an Audi and a BMW. I want a BMW when I get a job. That’s the first thing I’ll buy.”

“Oh, really.” I sniffed. “The only time they all manage to get together as a family is when they go on some expensive safari thousands of miles away.”

“Just because they’ve got good jobs,” George said, “you shouldn’t be jealous.”

“I’m not jealous!” I declared. “How could I be jealous of anyone working those ridiculous hours? They’ve sold their souls.”

“Oh, Mum,” George said reprovingly.

“Anyway, after the divorce you have to move house and change schools.”

“Because you do. Money. Jobs. And you go and live with your father and your little brother, and you visit your mother at weekends. You might even ask if you can go and live with your grandma for a while.”

“Why?” George said again, large-eyed, even more down in the mouth.

“For a break,” I said absently.

Grow up in certain homes and it’s like being out on a cold, choppy sea in an open dinghy with two angry fishermen in charge. Or sometimes just a single fisherman, who is, what’s more, drunk. Whereas with a grandparent life for a child can be less dangerous, more like being afloat on a reservoir.

“What happens next?”

“The mum wants a new start. She wants to see the world! Everybody else has.”

“But, Mum, Mr. Mottram will think it’s really you.”

“When you think about it,” I mused, “it’s none of Mr. Mottram’s business. He should only be interested in it as a piece of writing. Is it a good piece of writing? Is it convincing?”

“What if he asks me?” George muttered.

“He won’t. He’s an English teacher, isn’t he, not a psychotherapist. So if he did ask you he’d just be being nosy.”

George shrugged helplessly.

When I went to live with my grandmother for a while, she had enough to eat but not quite enough to keep warm. She was over seventy, but she had kept on one of her old cleaning jobs—Mrs. Blincoe—mainly for the sake of being in a house with central heating. I’d go along to help with the floors; then, while she polished and dusted, I’d puzzle over the Latin homework that held my enfranchisement. She never considered this work demeaning, and in fact looked down on Mrs. Blincoe as an unfeminine woman, a cold woman who had made her husband lonely and who did not grieve when he died but said, “Now I’m free to do what I want to do,” and went off round the world on various package holidays. The cheerful bearded sailor on her packet of Players was as close as my grandmother ever got to the sea. She cooked with a cigarette in her mouth; quite often ash would fall into the gravy, and she would stir it in as extra seasoning.

“Listen, you’re doing ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ aren’t you?” I continued. “Do you think Shakespeare got asked whether he’d ever grown donkey’s ears?”

George smiled briefly.

“Right. So you see your mum at weekends, and one weekend she tells you she wants to go to Peru and asks if she can borrow your Duke of Edinburgh rucksack. She promises she’ll send you postcards. It’s just something she’s got to do to move forward in her life.”

George scribbled away, not happy with where the story line was going but incapable of coming up with an alternative. I felt powerful, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat.

“I still don’t think it’s allowed,” he said.

“Of course it’s allowed,” I said. “You’ve got to have things happening, see, or it’s not a story. Think of the films you like. Car chases. Explosions. Sharks.”

“Can the mum be swimming in the China Sea and then a shark comes up?” George asked hopefully, trying to enter into the creative spirit.

“Probably not,” I said dryly. “That might be a step too far for Mr. Mottram, don’t you think?”

“But you said—”

“Yes, but we’ve got to make it believable. It’s like a game, isn’t it? He shouldn’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s made up.”

“I’d like to go to Japan,” George said. “They’ve got the new Nintendo Wii there, and I could get it way ahead of everybody else. Plus, you don’t have to have injections to go there.”

“Next,” I said. “I think the dad meets someone else, don’t you? At first he’s just been going to work and coming back and cooking nasty teas. You’ve had to help—buying a loaf of bread on the way home from school, that sort of thing, and doing the washing up without being asked.”

“Isn’t there a dishwasher in the new place?”

“It’s broken. And nobody gets round to finding someone to mend it, and, anyway, you’re all out all day. Maybe your little brother can be in because he’s ill, though. Chicken pox.”

“My little brother can’t be left on his own,” George objected. “If he’s seven or eight or something. That’s against the law.”

“O.K., you’ve got an older sister instead.”

“ She can cook,” he said with satisfaction. The meals were worrying him.

“No, she can’t,” I said. “She just eats crisps and bananas. No, it’s the dad that has to do it after work, unless you start teaching yourself from a cookbook.”

George looked up from his pad suspiciously. I was always trying to get him interested in cutting up broccoli florets or making omelettes.

“The dad should do it,” he protested. “I’m a kid, it’s not my job. Kids should be looked after by their parents.”

“You’re thirteen, George!” I said. I was about to bring up the walk from Wakefield, but then I stopped myself. “Oh well, it’s your story. The dad does the cooking, but it’s always pasta.”

“Cool,” George said, grinning.

“And the pasta is always soggy.” I scowled. “Feel free to carry on.”

“No, no,” he said. “After you.”

“He’s been trying to cook, but he’s no good at it. Then he meets, let’s see, Miranda. You know she’s not nasty or anything, but she’s got nothing to do with you. And he starts including her in on everything.”

“She’s always there when he’s around, watching television with you, in between you on the sofa.”

“What, even when football’s on?”

“Yes. She pretends to like it. She says she’s a Chelsea supporter.”

“Chelsea,” George said grimly.

“One weekend your mum tells you she’s off backpacking in three days’ time, first stop Thailand,” I continued. “We need to wind this up, George. She promises she’ll send postcards. You could have them arriving a bit later on with little messages—you know, ate fried tortoise, went bungee jumping, that sort of thing. You could stick them on the fridge so Miranda can see them.”

“Maybe she can cook.”

“Not likely,” I said. “She’s not interested in food. She doesn’t see why she should, anyway. Why should she? Then it’s the last straw. You’ve just had another of these postcards; the mum’s got as far as Australia. And your dad announces that your holiday this year is camping in Wales—there’s no money for anything else. He can stretch to walking boots for you and your sister, but that’s it.”

“Wales,” George said, with leaden emphasis.

“I think you can leave it somewhere there,” I said airily. “It’s April now—people are planning their summer holidays. Mr. Mottram will buy that.”

“But how do I finish it off?”

“You don’t have to really; you don’t have to solve everything. It’s not a police procedural. But you’re right, you do need something.”

“I know,” I said. “Pull in your love of football. All these months since the divorce you’ve turned to football to help you forget. This year you’ve been following the Champions’ League with a passion. Is your team doing all right in it? Manchester United?”

“Last night’s game was amazing , Mum,” George said earnestly. “Rooney scored this goal in the ninety-first minute, and I couldn’t believe it.” He shook his head in wonder. “It was unbelievable.”

“Was he happy?”

“He did this full-body dive all the way along the grass, then he lay with his head on his arms, and they all bundled in on top of him. We were playing at home, though—it might not be so good in the away match.”

“You can put all that in, just like you’ve told it to me.” I’d been struck by a thought. “Now, what does the Man U crowd chant when it wants the team to win? You know, like Tottenham’s is ‘Come on, you Spu-urs.’ ”

“ united ! united !” George chanted automatically.

“There you are,” I said. “That’s your last paragraph. You explain how football has got you through your parents’ divorce. You describe Rooney’s great goal in the ninety-first minute. How your team means so much to you. Then you write how you joined in with the TV crowd shouting, “ united ! united !” And you round it off with the words ‘Ironic, really.’ ”

“Ha,” said George, who wasn’t slow on the uptake, even if the pilot light of his imagination had yet to flare into action. He smiled reluctantly and started to write this down.

I looked at his fair head bent over the writing pad. The time for advice was almost gone. Beware heat without warmth. When a man loses his temper, people say, That’s the Irish in him, or the Scottish, or the Viking. Don’t listen to them. Dirty players or terriers are what they call footballers with that anger-stoked edge, but strength without sweetness is no use at all.

“Ironic because?” I asked.

“The mum and the dad. They’re not united.”

“There you are.”

I glanced at the kitchen clock.

“I’ve got to get on,” I said. “I’ve got my own work to do.”

“That’s all right,” he said, smiling up at me. “You go. I can do it now.” ♦

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The Surprising History of Homework Reform

Really, kids, there was a time when lots of grownups thought homework was bad for you.

Homework causes a lot of fights. Between parents and kids, sure. But also, as education scholar Brian Gill and historian Steven Schlossman write, among U.S. educators. For more than a century, they’ve been debating how, and whether, kids should do schoolwork at home .

At the dawn of the twentieth century, homework meant memorizing lists of facts which could then be recited to the teacher the next day. The rising progressive education movement despised that approach. These educators advocated classrooms free from recitation. Instead, they wanted students to learn by doing. To most, homework had no place in this sort of system.

Through the middle of the century, Gill and Schlossman write, this seemed like common sense to most progressives. And they got their way in many schools—at least at the elementary level. Many districts abolished homework for K–6 classes, and almost all of them eliminated it for students below fourth grade.

By the 1950s, many educators roundly condemned drills, like practicing spelling words and arithmetic problems. In 1963, Helen Heffernan, chief of California’s Bureau of Elementary Education, definitively stated that “No teacher aware of recent theories could advocate such meaningless homework assignments as pages of repetitive computation in arithmetic. Such an assignment not only kills time but kills the child’s creative urge to intellectual activity.”

But, the authors note, not all reformers wanted to eliminate homework entirely. Some educators reconfigured the concept, suggesting supplemental reading or having students do projects based in their own interests. One teacher proposed “homework” consisting of after-school “field trips to the woods, factories, museums, libraries, art galleries.” In 1937, Carleton Washburne, an influential educator who was the superintendent of the Winnetka, Illinois, schools, proposed a homework regimen of “cooking and sewing…meal planning…budgeting, home repairs, interior decorating, and family relationships.”

Another reformer explained that “at first homework had as its purpose one thing—to prepare the next day’s lessons. Its purpose now is to prepare the children for fuller living through a new type of creative and recreational homework.”

That idea didn’t necessarily appeal to all educators. But moderation in the use of traditional homework became the norm.

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“Virtually all commentators on homework in the postwar years would have agreed with the sentiment expressed in the NEA Journal in 1952 that ‘it would be absurd to demand homework in the first grade or to denounce it as useless in the eighth grade and in high school,’” Gill and Schlossman write.

That remained more or less true until 1983, when publication of the landmark government report A Nation at Risk helped jump-start a conservative “back to basics” agenda, including an emphasis on drill-style homework. In the decades since, continuing “reforms” like high-stakes testing, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Common Core standards have kept pressure on schools. Which is why twenty-first-century first graders get spelling words and pages of arithmetic.

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Home > Special Education & Autism Resources > Social Stories > Social Stories for Tests & Homework

Social Stories for Tests & Homework

An integral part of a student’s education is ensuring comprehension of the subjects being taught. This is reinforced through the assignment of homework, and comprehension is assessed through exams and testing. 

Exams can be nerve wracking for students but there are ways you can help your child or students prepare. Using a behavior story can help you to set expectations for your child and help them understand the what and why of a situation! 

Standardized tests may have their own unique set of rules and expectations for students. Some tests may have time limits, or have different sections that need to be completed in a specific order. 

If you are helping your student prepare for a standardized test, be sure to make your behavior social story as specific as possible. Use your student’s special interest areas (such as favorite cartoon characters) to reinforce potential scenarios and the appropriate responses to them. 

Learn more about using behavior social stories to prepare your students for exams and to reinforce the importance of homework! 

The special education resources on this page were authored by Watson Institute’s Lisa Plastino, M.Ed., special education consultant .

These behavior social stories may benefit your students.  They can be downloaded, saved and edited to suit your needs.  The * notation indicates the story is  formatted in a Power Point presentation and the ** notation indicates a Power Point with sound narration.  Each Power Point has animation included on each slide.  Some occur automatically – some occur on a “click”.  Feel free to send comments or questions to [email protected] .

Sometimes Kids Don’t Get 100%

Sometimes Kids Don’t Get 100% – Longer Version

Taking Tests

PSSA Tests *

Princesses Do Their Homework

Responsibilities

Taking the PSSAs

Taking the MAP Test

If you have questions or concerns about the Watson Institute’s use of this information, please contact us .

• How can we make this resource more helpful?

Helping all children become happy learners

Doing homework, homework is a task we do at home to support our learning in school. most schools expect their students to do some homework., here is some information about doing homework:, some homework helps us remember learning, some homework helps us learn new things, some homework we enjoy doing and some we find boring, as we get older we are often expected to do more homework, finding time to do homework can sometimes be difficult. sometimes we find excuses to do other things we enjoy rather than doing our homework., having to do our homework can make us feel annoyed or angry. many children feel this way., if we do not do our homework we can make our teachers and parents upset or angry, if we do not do our homework we might find learning harder in school, homework is given to help us become better at learning. it is not always fun and most people would rather be doing something else but it can helps us with our learning., homework is a task we do at home to help us with learning. , homework can help us remember things we did in school. sometimes we might have homework that helps us to learn new things., most children have homework tasks that they enjoy doing and some tasks that they wish they didn't have to do., having to do our homework can make us feel annoyed or angry. many children feel this way. , if we do not do our homework we can make our teachers and parents upset or angry. if we do not do our homework we might also find learning in school much harder., as we get older we are often expected to do more homework., homework is given to help us become better at learning. it is not always fun and most people would rather be doing something else but it can helps us with our learning. , my homework, homework is a learning task that i need to do outside the school day., i am given homework to help me become a more independent learner. some tasks i may enjoy doing and some i may dislike doing. this is normal for many people., even when i don't enjoy homework it is important that i do it. if i don't do my homework i may get into trouble at school. it is a school rule that i do my homework., it is important that i have a good routine for doing my homework. i can allow enough time to do my best work. if i need help i can tell someone so i don't get worried about it., homework is just school learning that i do independently. i can try to do my best work. it is ok if i need to ask for help., my homework diary, a homework diary is a way of recording details about homework assignments., when i get homework i can write down what i need to do in my homework diary. i can also write when i need to hand it in., writing my homework in my homework diary means i can always know where to look to check what homework i have. this can help me so i don't forget. if i forget to do homework i may get into trouble with my school., if i forget to write down some of my homework i can ask someone to tell me. i can ask a friend who was in the same lesson to tell me. i can also ask the teacher at the end of lesson or at break time or the end of the day., i can write my homework in my homework diary. i can then complete my homework and hand it in on time., notes on creating your own personalised social story:, use the above examples to create your own personalised social story for the child. if you need to modify the language to support younger children ensure that the exact meaning intended remains clear and unambiguous. you may want to add photographs or pictures to illustrate the meaning or provide motivation to use. alternatively, print out versions of the social stories are available below..

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