Homework in elementary school is just a waste of time, theft from children and their families. The research is clear that it’s ineffective in aiding learning prior to middle school at the earliest.
An institution dedicated to teaching children would look very different to elementary, middle or high schools in any country’s public education system. They’d use mastery based learning rather than age based progression and spaced repetition at the most basic. Those particular educational techniques are more than a century old and used more or less nowhere.
On a less iconoclastic note German elementary schools are mostly half day and French ones full day. There is no real difference in their graduates readiness for middle and high school. And kindergarten as mostly play systems have no worse and often better results than kindergarten as school lite systems. In Finland they don’t even teach kindergarteners to read. They do fine in the end.
Elementary school is not primarily about education. Homework is not about education at all at that level.
I wonder if over-education of younger kids in the US is leading to some kids feeling stigmatized towards education in general. There seems to be a growing trend of trying to teach kids things before they're truly mentally ready. Everyone I know is sending their children to head-start preschool type things instead of normal day care. The result seems to be that children are mostly just being made to conform, and they are merely memorizing for purposes of adult approval and some kind of reward or lack of punishment (similar to teach a dog a trick) rather than actually learning.
Pre-K - 1st grade, let's get them drawing lines and curves with pencils, pins, brushes; with inks and paints. Give them clay to form with their hands, then give them tools to form it. Keep up that practice in years to come. Have them writing letters in various ways: print, cursive, calligraphy.
Do this in their formative years, giving them control other their fingers, hands, wrists, arms; give them creative outlets.
Then, as we introduce abstract concepts, they have tools to visualize their understanding, or creatively express the concepts to their classmates.