BJU Press Blog -

Finding Downtime in a Busy Homeschool Day

November 12, 2019 by Megan

I am a homeschooling mother of four young children, but sometimes I feel more like a juggler in the circus. My days are spent trying to juggle myriads of responsibilities—laundry, cleaning, cooking, teaching, grading, planning, shopping, driving, and so on. Who has time for rest and downtime? It’s my job to make sure no responsibilities get dropped.

But not even an expert juggler can juggle forever. The stress of constant activity will surely lead to disaster. And it’s the same for us. Homeschool life can leave us feeling physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually burned out. Sometimes we need to set aside our normal flurry of activities and just rest. We homeschool moms need some downtime. How do we get it? Here are some ideas.

Make Downtime a Part of Your Routine

Homeschool moms are not the only ones who will benefit from a break from the demands of a homeschool day. Our kids need some time away from the books as well. In my homeschool, we always take a midmorning break (around 9:30) to have a snack and get some energy out. If the weather is nice—and sometimes even when it isn’t—we go outside and take a short walk or play a few minutes on a nearby playground. The exercise and fresh air helps my kids’ concentration levels and helps me manage the stress of the day.

Teach Your Kids to Rest

Only one of my children still naps during the day, but all of them have some quiet or rest time. During that hours or so they are supposed to work independently on quiet activities (coloring, writing, sewing, reading, etc.). This gives me some space to pick up a book of my own or work on a creative project, and it gives my kids the opportunity to pursue some of their own interests.

Intentionally Put Aside Your Work

After my kids go to bed, I often move into high gear; after all, these after-bedtime hours are usually the most productive hours of the day. I do get a lot done in the evening. But there comes a point when I must say “enough” and put the work aside. I need some time to decompress. And I need sufficient sleep.

In the middle of this very busy season of life, it’s often hard to take a break and claim some downtime. You may feel guilty doing it. But consider what Ruth Chou Simons writes in her book Gracelaced:

If you feel worn out, friend, it’s a pretty good indication that our infinite God made you finite for a purpose. He is reminding you that resting isn’t just a good idea; it’s His example and standard for us. Our all-powerful God does not grow weary, and yet He chose to rest on the seventh day of creation. (p. 52)

So, homeschool mom, stop and take a deep breath. You were not created to do everything. You were created to rest in the only One Who can. So enjoy the freedom to rest.

Role-Play and a Colonial Activity

October 30, 2019 by Jenna

Children love role-play. Toys become props, and a jungle gym, a tree, or even the living-room furniture can become a stage for a unique role-play session. They play house, make up war games, or act out stories they’ve read or seen in movies. And they will use anything—and I do mean anything—that they’ve seen or learned in their role-play, even if it doesn’t exactly fit there.

I remember as a child creating stories with matchbox cars in a doll playhouse. I also remember having a Polly Pocket as a Star Trek tricorder in one hand and a Lego® phaser in the other. As a teen, I watched a group of first graders playing after school. One little girl, the leader, laid out the game they would play. She was drawing from her lessons, her favorite stories, and her own rather wild imagination. It was one of the most intricate and regulated children’s games I have ever seen. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but none of the other kids seemed to mind.

One of the best ways you can get your kids engaged in a lesson is to fit it into a story that they can remember. If you give them fodder for role-play, you’ll see them reusing what they’ve learned in any number of ways. Here’s an activity for creating a hornbook when you’re teaching about how children learned in the New England colonies.

Making Your Own Hornbook

This activity comes from the Heritage Studies 2 teacher edition (Lesson 52). In this lesson, children learn about dame schools and how hornbooks helped the kids in the colonies to memorize their letters and the Lord’s Prayer.

Materials

Hornbook pattern and text
8½ x 11 sheet of stiff paper (construction paper, posterboard, or cardstock)
4 brass fasteners
24” length of string or ribbon
Sheet protector
Hole punch

Directions

Print and cut out the hornbook pattern. Use it as a guide to cut the stiff paper into the shape of a hornbook.
Cut out your sheet protector so it’s the same size as your hornbook. Hornbooks got their name because they were usually covered by a thin sheet of animal horn for protection. You’ll be using a this sheet protector instead of animal horn.
Print and cut out the alphabet and Lord’s Prayer text.
Punch a hole in each of the four corners of the sheet protector, text, and hornbook.
Attach all three pieces together with brass fasteners.
Punch an additional hole at the end of the handle.
Thread the string or ribbon through the hole and tie the ends to make a big loop. Children would often wear their hornbooks around their necks or tied to their belts so they wouldn’t lose them and so they could study them throughout the day.

Role-Play Starters for Using Your Hornbook

Once the lesson is done, use these starters to get your kids’ minds engaged in play with the things they’ve just learned.

Pretend you’re the teacher at a dame school and you’re helping one of your students (e.g., a sibling or willing parent) use his or her brand-new hornbook.
Imagine you’re a child in the New England colonies and you have to wear your hornbook for the rest of the day.

But don’t be surprised! You may find sometime in the future that your child’s hornbook has become a fan, a pizza peel (the giant spatula used to put a pizza in the oven), or a crossing guard sign as your kids use it in their play.

5 Apple Projects to Do After Your Orchard Visit

October 29, 2019 by Guest Writer

There’s nothing like the crisp, sweet taste of a fresh apple—except maybe the warm, sugary flavor of an apple cider doughnut melting on your tongue. For many families, visiting an apple orchard becomes a prized yearly tradition. But after all the apple-picking fun and the enjoyable orchard activities, you might be left with bushels of apples—more than your family can eat. Check out these five types of apple projects to do after your orchard visit.

• Edible Apple Projects

Apple pie is an obvious way to use up some of those apples, but don’t forget about apple cobbler, apple turnovers, apple pancakes, apple breads, and apple muffins. If you’d like to save some of these goodies for later, research freezer-friendly recipes.

Feeling ambitious? Try making your own apple butter, apple sauce, or apple chips. You can even use these apple activities as teaching opportunities! Talk to your kids about the chemical processes involved in changing the fruit from one form to another.

• Raw Apples in Everything

Try raw sliced apples in all kind of dishes! Make finding new ways to include apples in favorite meals a game with your kids. Thinly-sliced raw apples add a bit of extra crunch to sandwiches. They lend sweetness to salads and coleslaw. Dice the apples and sprinkle them over carrot soup, pumpkin soup, oatmeal, or cereal. You can even find recipes for spicy apple salsa!

• Apple Drinks

The cider you purchase at the orchard always seems to vanish too quickly. Why not make your own slow-cooker apple cider? You can also squeeze the apples and create homemade apple juice. If you’ve got a blender, add apples to smoothies for breakfast or snacks.

• Apple Candle Holders

If you’ve got some apples that are bruised or otherwise inedible, hollow them out and insert tea-lights. You’ll have an instant set of fall-themed, sweet-smelling candle holders that will beautify your kitchen island or your table for at least a week or so.

• Apple Potpourri

Follow this recipe to create delightful simmering potpourri that will make your home amazingly fragrant for the fall holidays. You can also create a dried version that looks and smells appealing. Consider putting extra batches in bags or jars as holiday gifts.

With some time, creativity, and the right recipes, you can take full advantage of the bounty you bring home from the orchard this year! Experiment with these apple projects, and let us know if you discover some favorite apple activities we haven’t included here. Happy apple-picking!

• • • • •

Rebecca is a work-at-home freelance writer, novelist, wife, and the mom of two bright-eyed little ones. She credits her success in writing and her love of books to her own mom, who homeschooled three kids from pre-K through high school.

Joy of Learning: Taking Joy at Work

October 22, 2019 by Ben

When I was six, my dad took our family on a homeschool field trip to Patriots Point Navel & Maritime Museum in Charleston, SC. I was awestruck from the moment we drove into view of the Yorktown aircraft carrier. After exploring old navy ships, I was hooked—history became my favorite subject and it was fodder for play. And I still love history.

Joy permeates my history learning. Even in times when it became tedious, the thrill of mastering the subject never left me. That experience with my dad set the tone for my learning.

As homeschool parents, we want our children to have joy in learning. I want my daughters to love history as much as I do.

Joy of Learning in the Bible

Do we have a scriptural expectation to find joy in learning? We should start by looking at our expectation to have joy in our work. Then we can examine the connection between learning and work.

Taking Joy at Work

Most Americans view work as a drudgery, a long slog until they get to what they really want: a weekend full of pleasure. One way to summarize the American Dream is “work hard so you can play harder.”

But that’s not a scriptural view of work. The book of Ecclesiastes tells us three times that “a man… should make his soul enjoy good in his labor” (Ecclesiastes 2:24, see also Ecclesiastes 3:12-13 and Ecclesiastes 5:18-19). And for good reason. The Lord intends that we “enjoy the good of all [our] labor” (Ecclesiastes 5:18). Even better, we should enjoy our labor because God gives us the power to work (Ecclesiastes 5:19).

Best of all, the work itself is given by God. In the beginning, God gave mankind dominion over creation. Even before the Fall, Adam and Eve worked by dressing the garden and naming the creatures. So when we take up a lawful task to meet a legitimate need, we are fulfilling one of God’s original intents for us.

You know, we, as parents, experience this every year at Thanksgiving or Christmas. We invest long hours on our feet in the kitchen preparing a feast. Some parts are fun, like making pie filling. Others are tedious, like peeling ten pounds of potatoes. Then there’s the layer of dust to clean from the fine china. And, of course, we can’t use the dishwasher for that! But what a joy it is to cook with your family and see them delight in the meal! Even scrubbing the grease off the turkey roast pan can be satisfying.

Let’s not lose sight of the joy we can have in the work of homeschooling our children. Some parts may be fun, and others tedious, but the final result is priceless. It is God’s calling for us, and we can and should find joy and satisfaction in it.

Work and Learning

Since God intends for us to have joy in our work, can we apply that to our children’s learning? In Isaiah 28, the Lord makes an important connection between learning and working.

In this passage, the prophet confronts the proud farmers of his day. He asks them a series of questions about the fundamentals of farming. Do they plow? Are they planting seed? What about the careful arrangements they make in planting their seeds? “Of course!” the farmers are thinking. Then Isaiah asserts, “For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth teach him” (Isaiah 28:26). You can imagine these arrogant men thinking: “No he didn’t; I figured that out on my own,” or, “My dad taught me that, not God.” But they’re missing the point. God created His world to work a certain way. When we adjust our lives through careful observation to the way He made the world, we are learning from Him. The learning is coming from His hand.

The learning and the work both come from God’s hand. For our kids, their primary calling—their work—is to learn. It enables them to exercise dominion over creation, just like the farmers from Isaiah’s time. And just as God gives joy to the laborer, we can expect God to give joy to our children while they work at their calling of learning.

I love teaching history to my daughters. My dad inspired a lifelong love of learning about the past, and now I get to share it with his grandchildren. Homeschooling is one of our most blessed callings. What a delight it is to be right there, when the light bulb goes off for our children and we see the joy! What we’re witnessing is our children receiving the gift of joy in learning from God’s own hands.

Biblical Worldview Education: Mind the Gap

October 15, 2019 by Jenna

Many times the Bible calls Christians to be set apart—we are holy, consecrated, chosen, sanctified. But what does it mean to be set apart as a Christian homeschool family? At times, you may feel that you are set apart simply by being a homeschool family, but as more families recognize the impact of public education on their children, secular homeschooling also becomes more popular. If secular families can adopt the homeschool lifestyle, it isn’t inherently Christian. What, then, makes education Christian? It is possible to be a dedicated Christian family that attends church regularly and still miss a vital element of biblical worldview education.

What is that vital element of biblical worldview education? It has to do with how we look at the world—with our worldviews. Secularism has had a profound impact on the Christian worldview, and many of us don’t even realize that we’re holding a secular worldview.

The Two Stories of the World

At BJU Press, we often talk amongst ourselves about the two-story view. You could also call it a secular disconnect. It’s a worldview that divides the things we encounter into two separate levels, like a two-story house. Each story holds certain aspects of the world. The second story is God’s level. It’s where we attend church and have Bible studies. For Christians, it’s where we keep our testimonies and our morals. Our positions on the major political “hot topics” usually come from here.

The first story is the world’s level. It’s supposed to be a neutral level where religious views don’t matter. That’s the definition of secularism: indifference to, rejection of, or exclusion of religion and religious considerations, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In the lower level, we aren’t supposed to use our upper-story views to make decisions because they shouldn’t be relevant. Here, you find math, spelling, and grammar lessons. Here are all the science lessons that aren’t related to creation. After all, how can knowledge of the Bible change how we teach math, spelling, or grammar? Isn’t an igneous rock an igneous rock regardless of how it came to be?

Problems of a Two-Story View

Obviously, this view has problems. For Christians, our faith is the foundation for all of our interactions with the world. It’s the basis for every decision we make, whether we’re at home, at church, in the grocery store, or in a courtroom. If we take away the very foundation for our decision making process, then we have no business attempting to influence anyone in the world according to our morals, our principles, and our beliefs.

This view also changes education. If the Bible only belongs in Bible things—at church, in Bible class, or personal devotions—then it can’t be relevant to non-Bible subjects. Sure, you can talk about the Bible in math class, but it doesn’t connect to the lesson. The lesson is as secular as if it were taught in a public school. And Bible integration? It’s just a corresponding Bible verse or devotional that’s been tacked on.

A Biblical Worldview Education

If God’s world is God’s world, then there’s no part of His creation the Bible doesn’t apply to. Christians should not see the world divided into “Bible things” and the world’s things. They should see Christ’s lordship in all things. Christ is lord of the world just as He is lord of the church. This is the reality that a biblical worldview education teaches.

BJU Press materials use the Big Story of creation to teach Christ’s power and lordship, highlighting His intentions for the world at Creation, the brokenness of the world because of human sin in the Fall, and His plan for the world’s redemption.

With this story, we acknowledge not only the beauty of God’s creation, but also its brokenness. For example, God created communication, and it was good. Because we are sinful, we often communicate in twisted ways. But God can sanctify our ability to communicate so we can use it for His glory. We study grammar so we can communicate well without distorting Christ’s message.

If children can learn to recognize how the Fall distorts things that God created good, then they can also learn how to live faithfully in light of God’s redemptive work in their lives. We work through this model in all our subjects so children aren’t learning secular lessons with a verse tacked on at the end. Instead, the Bible shapes their world. We want to equip them to respond to the secular mindset that divides the world.

A biblical worldview education reshapes how your children think about the world. With a strong foundation, they can have biblical discernment and can account for the fallen nature of the world. That is how to set your children apart from the world: by teaching them to think differently from the world.