homeschool

A Mom’s Experience with Focus on Fives

February 4, 2020 by Megan

I have a confession—I never wanted to homeschool a kindergartner. I was afraid to. My training didn’t include early childhood education. I didn’t know how to teach someone to read. And I didn’t think that I was a good enough to teach my child all the foundational skills that she would need to succeed in her education. But the Lord made it abundantly clear that I was to be my daughter’s kindergarten teacher. I wrestled with the Lord about it, and He reminded me of the promise of I Thessalonians 5:24, “Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it.” The Lord did equip me for the task of homeschooling my daughter, and the main means that He used was the Focus on Fives curriculum from BJU Press.

An Introduction to the Focus on Fives Curriculum

The Focus on Fives curriculum replaces BJU Press’s former kindergarten curriculum, K5 Beginnings, and it is a major upgrade. The pedagogy—or teaching methods—and the scope and sequence are very similar to K5 Beginnings, but the format is streamlined and the content, including the artwork, has been updated.

When you order the Focus on Fives textbook kit, be ready for a lot of stuff. You receive 6 teacher editions—which initially looks very overwhelming, but it’s actually wonderful because everything you need as a teacher is in one place. Your child receives 2 workbooks—a general workbook and a phonics workbook—as well as 34 full-color reading books. You’ll also get the K5 Phonics and Review Cards, the Write Now! workbook, the Phonics charts, and the teaching visuals packet.

BJU Press is releasing the Focus on Fives video course for the 2020–21 school year. Mrs. Becky Rulapaugh teaches this course. She currently teaches the K5 Math video course that my daughter loves. She’s very good at keeping my daughter engaged.

Lesson Features of Focus on Fives

Heritage Studies and Science

Every Focus on Fives lesson starts off with a heritage studies or science connection. For example, the program starts off with a unit about community helpers. We learned about police officers, firefighters and fire safety, postal workers, doctors, and dentists. The program introduces the topics with a listening story or a composition activity to encourage critical thinking skills. Some lessons also include simple activities, like demonstrating how brushing helps your teeth, to enhance comprehension.

Phonics Foundations

At the heart of every lesson is language arts instruction. BJU Press teaches children to read using a combination of a phonics-based word-family approach along with sight words. The word-family approach ensures that every new sound your child learns can be easily “hooked onto” previous knowledge, and the use of high-frequency sight words helps your child read meaningful text even before you’ve introduced all the sounds.

Language Arts

In addition to phonics instruction, the language arts portion of the lesson covers basic English topics like sentence punctuation, capitalization, the use of plurals and other concepts necessary for reading comprehension. Some lessons will also use phonics characters to help your child identify syllabic patterns to aid them in reading unfamiliar words. Finally, all lessons include handwriting instruction and practice.

Enrichment Activities

Every lesson also includes a list of enrichment activities that go along with the lesson’s topic. The teacher edition includes suggested read-alouds, games, crafts, special snacks, and more. I don’t usually have time to do all the suggested activities, but I do like to pick and choose as time allows.

Reading Books

Although we practice reading every day with short phonics stories, the highlight of our week is our reading book lesson. On those days, we unveil our “big book” of the week. These 8-page, 4-color books reinforce everything that we have learned during the previous weeks and give us good opportunities to develop comprehension and critical thinking skills.

What I love about Focus on Fives

The Focus on Fives teacher editions, in my estimation, are invaluable because they have given me the confidence to teach my daughter. Everything is laid out for me in one place, so I know exactly what I need to do each day. And even though the lessons are not scripted, the teacher edition gives me all the help I need. It’s kind of like having a relative with medical training come with you to a doctor’s appointment—that relative might not be the one in charge, but his or her expert presence certainly makes you feel more confident.

I also love how the curriculum is very flexible. It’s easy to figure out what is necessary to cover in every lesson and what is optional. If I only cover the essentials, we can get through a lesson in about 45 minutes. However, I try to include 1 or 2 of the optional activities every lesson, so usually it takes about an hour a day. And it works fine with my 4-day-a-week schedule even though it’s set up for a more traditional 5-day-a-week schedule.

But Does it Work?

I have really enjoyed seeing my daughter thrive with this curriculum. She gets excited every time I introduce a new sound or a new word family—she loves dreaming up sentences for the new words she learns. She reads with confidence, and she reads with joy. And I have confidence that she’s going to do great as she continues in her journey.

To learn more about the Focus on Fives materials, check out the subject kit on the BJU Press Homeschool website!

Teaching for Joy in Learning

January 21, 2020 by Ben

Have you seen that brief animation of the learning process at a government school? I mean the one where a student, who’s sitting upright in a small, traditional desk, moves along a conveyor belt. At the student’s first stop, a robotic arms saws off the top of his cranium, revealing a light bulb. At the next stop, a robotic arm wielding a hammer smashes the lightbulb. And at the final stop, a robotic arm bestows a graduation cap. The process continues on and on with child after child moving through the “educational” process at government schools. This system was not designed for teaching children to take joy in learning.

This animation illustrates a critical fact: educational approaches have impacts on educational outcomes. So what outcome do we want for our children? We want them to think biblically about all of life. We also want them to receive the joy they can expect from their calling. In past blog posts, we’ve explored the scriptural reasons for expecting that our children can have this kind of joy. We’ve also examined reasons why our children’s experiences may be anything but joyful. While some of those reasons relate to factors inside our children, today we want to focus on the factors that we as parents and the educators of our children are responsible for. We need to create educational experiences for our children that most closely conform to how children learn.

When it comes to encouraging learning, I don’t have a comprehensive list of best teaching practices or foolproof methods. I hope to keep learning as my wife and I continue on our homeschool journey. But here are some effective approaches for teaching a joy of learning I’ve learned so far.

1. Teaching Joy with Understanding-Based Learning

Learning that focuses on understanding instead of performance cultivates joy in learning. It can be incredibly satisfying to have a child who performs off the charts on a standardized test or who can recite the Roman emperors’ names from memory. Your child might perform well on paper, but what about his or her understanding? If performance is what we’re aiming for, then we’re not concerned about children’s understanding, just their ability to memorize and regurgitate information. And what we get is children who do well on tests but can’t apply what they’ve learned. Unless they’re also focused on performance, then children who just learn for the grade get bored or frustrated.

Instead, we should be interested in comprehension. When a child understands math, it’s not only easier to learn, but the child has the tools to use math effectively. That’s why breaking out math manipulatives or engaging in other hands-on activities is so powerful. Understanding-based learning is the bridge to higher levels of learning. And Scripture reminds us that “knowledge is easy to him who understandeth” (Proverbs 14:6).

2. Sequenced Learning

Putting learning in the proper order, or sequence, prepares your child for the next step. When children have all the pieces they need for understanding at the time they need them, they’re equipped to find joy in learning. Has someone ever explained something to you, assuming that you already knew something that you didn’t know? Maybe there was important information that you’d never learned. When that happens to me, I get confused and frustrated. I want to stop.

In the kitchen, we wouldn’t ask our children to add three eggs to a mixture until we had taught them how to crack an egg. It’s often easy to approach learning by jumping around from topic to topic without a plan in mind.

With sequenced learning, our goal is to challenge our children without frustrating them. We plan each step carefully so that they have prior experiences and the knowledge they need so that they can take the next step in learning. I love it when my daughter encounters a familiar concept that has added depth and complexity to it. She’s seen it before, but it looks new to her. The new information is more challenging than what she learned before, but it is simple because of her prior experience with the topic.

3. Authentic Learning

Another way of teaching a joy in learning by focusing on the purpose for learning instead of the test. Has your child ever asked, “Will that be on the test?” It’s often an expression of frustration. Instead of taking joy in the experience of learning new things, he or she just wants to know how to pass the class. At that point, your child is probably just overwhelmed by all the extra, seemingly unnecessary information. Children also express this frustration when they ask, “When will I ever use this?”

When we teach our children, we need to regularly show them the real world application of what they’re learning. When learning is relevant to their lives, it becomes real and authentic. They can use math at the grocery story. Or they can apply what they studied in science to make a ramp to move a heavy object. Or take spelling, for example. If we give our children a list of random spelling words to recite back on their test, they’re likely going to get bored or frustrated, and they won’t remember it beyond the test. But when part of their spelling assignment is to proofread someone else’s writing, it’s authentic. They see how spelling is relevant and useful.

When children start to use their learning, they’re exercising good and wise dominion in this world. That is one of the purposes that God has given mankind. And it is the reason we educate our children.

The choices we make in teaching our children will have an incredible impact on how they view learning. If we don’t aim for comprehension, if we teach things out of order, or if we don’t give them a reason for learning, then we won’t be teaching them to have joy in learning. We’ll be crippling their joy of learning, instead. We need to choose teaching methods that support our children. Then we will be able to see the light of joy in our children’s eyes as they’re learning.

Looking for the Little Moments

January 7, 2020 by Guest Writer

You’ve got a stack of homeschool textbooks on your hip and your tepid coffee in your hand. You’re tossing dirty clothes into the washing machine with the other hand while telling the four-year-old for the hundredth time that, no, she cannot watch her show—not until TV time this evening.

You realize that your nine-year-old has been running the water in the bathroom for a very long time, much longer than necessary for brushing teeth. For a second you see red dollar signs flashing before your eyes in anticipation of this month’s water bill. And then the baby yells imperiously from the crib, and you feel like crawling back into bed and just not adulting today. Or tomorrow. OK, for a whole month.

We’ve all been there. We’ve been swamped, overwhelmed by the onrushing tide of our children’s needs—educational, physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Prayer helps. Scripture helps. Asking for help from friends and family is important too. But there’s one more way to manage that exhaustion, especially as you begin the new year.

Look for the little moments.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that while you’re doing the laundry, you find a couple of tadpoles in your daughter’s pocket. Or maybe a dead lizard or a beetle. Once you get past the “ew” factor, remind yourself how wonderful it is that she’s interested in living things. And then find a moment, maybe right before bed, when you can talk to her about her affinity for biology. Sure, you can ask that she empty her pockets before putting her clothes in the laundry—but if you focus on the good, you’ll come away from the interaction more grateful than frustrated.

My kids argue over the silliest things sometimes. But yesterday my son put his arm around his little sister’s shoulders, and my heart melted. When you see a moment like that, relish it. Draw encouragement from it.

One night, I passed my son’s room long after he was supposed to have turned out his lamp, and I noticed light gleaming under the door. As I went in, ready to chide him, he looked up from his book, cheeks flushed with excitement, eyes bright. I recognized that look because I’ve read past my own bedtime many a night. Biting off the words I was going to say, I let him read for ten more minutes—because sleep is important, but becoming a lifelong reader is even more important. I will never forget that little moment we shared, not as mother and son but as readers.

As a homeschool parent, you get to see the magical instant when a concept “clicks” for your child. You get to be there when your fourth-grader comes to you with a new discovery, or when your gangly teen sits patiently while your youngest stumbles through her first easy reader.

Look for the little moments. Hold them in your mind, or write them down so you can read them and remember and rejoice in what you, by God’s grace, have accomplished so far. Who knows what beautiful moments will come your way in this new year?

• • • • •

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.

Using Different Editions: What You Need to Know

November 19, 2019 by Jenna

You’re looking for books for your youngest child. Because you’ve gone through all the same subjects with your older children, you’ve got almost everything you need already. You just need new copies of the consumables. You pull up the website to order them, only to find that a new edition has come out. The things you need aren’t available anymore. Can you use the materials from different editions together?

I get this question a lot. I love being able to tell parents that, yes, you can use the two editions together, but it’s rare. A lot of times, mixing editions seems cost effective, but it isn’t worth the hassle you’ll go through trying to make them compatible.

How Do Editions Change?

Let’s be real here. At BJU Press, our writers don’t completely rewrite a textbook to produce a new edition. That just wouldn’t be practical, especially when some content may not need to change. So what do we change before we release a new edition of a textbook?

• College Readiness and Best Practices

National standards for each subject and best practices for teaching different age levels tend to change regularly. We don’t actively adjust our materials to align with standards. However, we do research and make adjustments in the students’ interests. That way, we can assure parents that their children will be prepared for the next grade level, standardized tests, and current expectations for college freshmen. Additionally, research about how children learn continues to show educators that children need more than paragraphs of information to learn from. They need activities, visuals, and opportunities to use technology in a safe way. Many new editions update the textbooks according to that research. Sometimes these updates are more noticeable in the teacher edition than the student edition, but they do appear in both.

• BJU Press Standards

We also want our textbooks to measure up to our standards. Each new edition should have clear biblical worldview integration, teach critical thinking skills, and show children and teens that they can take joy in learning. We also add new technology resources as they become available.

• Design and Page Layout

Design is a key component to successful textbooks. Can a child understand certain kinds of information better from a paragraph or from an infographic? Even the amount of white space on a page can help or hinder a student’s learning. In many new editions, we’re adding design elements to encourage learning and comprehension.

• Errors and Feedback

Even in carefully prepared textbooks, mistakes happen. Issuing a new edition gives us a chance to fix errors from the previous edition. We also take the opportunity to incorporate some of the suggestions we’ve received from educators using our materials.

Problems with Using Different Editions

Not all new editions will have every type of change I’ve listed, but they usually do have several of them. And sometimes, the amount of change a textbook needs means that it will get heavily rewritten. Whenever we release a new student edition, we’ll also release updated versions of corresponding materials so that everything matches up. It doesn’t matter how much or how little the student edition has changed.

Some of the modifications we make may seem minor, but they can still be difficult to work around if you’re using materials from two different editions. Design updates can completely change the layout of the book, meaning all the page numbers are different in the new edition. That doesn’t sound like a big deal until you’re trying to grade your child’s reviews.

Updates to national standards, teaching strategies, and our own standards can lead to big changes in review questions and activity manuals. You’ll have to double check both versions to see which questions you have answers to, or create answers for anything you don’t have an answer to.

Obviously, total rewrites or heavy rewrites won’t be compatible with older editions, but even light changes to student activities and lab manuals can make the corresponding answer key obsolete.

Using Out-of-Print Materials

We always highly recommend that you get the updated materials, but we do understand that getting a whole new set of books isn’t always an option, especially if it’s an expense you weren’t expecting. You may be able to find out-of-print materials through third-party sellers, especially nonconsumables such as teacher editions and answer keys.

However, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to find student activities or labs from a third-party seller. In those cases, you can use the newer labs and activities with your older materials, provided that you get the newer answer key as well. Activities and labs often teach skills that are important for the course, but aren’t always directly covered in the student edition, so you don’t have to have the new student book. However, please note that this may not hold true for science courses Grade 7 and above. Life Science (5th edition) incorporates new lab activities that relate directly to skills from the student edition. These same skills weren’t covered in the same way or as directly in Life Science (4th edition). When activities do relate directly to the student edition, you can always skip them.

Unfortunately, if you are unable to find an unused copy of a student worktext, we can only recommend that you invest in the new book.

Of course, it’s up to you if you want to try mixing editions anyway. We wholeheartedly believe that each new edition is an improvement in the material. And, for you, it’s always worthwhile for your sanity and peace of mind to be using materials that are meant to be used together.

Adult Life Skills: Preparing Graduates That Think

September 24, 2019 by Jenna

Have you ever lost sight of the goal in the middle of the monotony of it all? Every day seems full of diagrams, algebraic equations, dates, and classifications. You can’t help but think, “What’s the point?” That’s the question that math students have always wondered about: “When are we ever going to use this?” But Mom, you’re not immune to that way of thinking either. Sometimes you just need to take time to remember what the point is. Yes, by homeschooling your children you’re ensuring that you have the final say about everything they learn. You’re taking the opportunity to disciple them so that they can live out God’s calling in their lives. And that’s a vital part of homeschooling. But do you really need to teach them the quadratic formula? Remember, you’re not just teaching them facts. You’re teaching them critical thinking skills. In other words, you’re teaching adult life skills.

Beyond the Facts

Those skeptical math students have a valid point. The technicalities of academic subjects aren’t all that useful for adult life skills. That complicated mathematical formula won’t help your child balance a checkbook. But what those math students don’t realize is that they’re not just learning facts. As they wrestle with a new concept, they’re also learning how to learn. They’re learning how to stay focused when working through long processes. They’re learning how to solve for missing information.

In the day-to-day minutia of academic studies, the facts aren’t important. What’s important is that your children are using their minds each day and growing. They’re learning to interact with new information, consider its implications, respond to it, make connections, and create and define new information. In other words, they’re learning to think.

Critical Thinking Skills and Adult Life Skills

Much like the math students questioning why they’re learning an obscure concept, many highschoolers are noticing that they can, say, rattle off all the taxonomic ranks of biological classifications, but they can’t apply for a credit card. It will probably come as a surprise to them, but many of the things they’ll need to do in their adult lives aren’t actually that hard to do. Applications for credit cards and other loans can be so easy to do that many of us do them without thinking about the serious implications of buying on credit. But at the end of the day, that’s exactly the kind of thing you want your graduates to be able to think about.

Young adults don’t need special courses on how to pay their bills and apply for loans. Companies have a vested interest in people paying bills and applying for loans, so they make those processes self-explanatory. But young adults do need to be able to consider the implications of missing a payment or having a credit card. Is a credit card really worth it? Is building one’s credit even as important as it seems? Would it be better to always pay for things with cash on hand? These are questions that your children will have to wrestle with and answer as they grow, but they probably don’t have the maturity and life experience needed to consider them now.

Your children can use the same processes they will use as they consider the implications and wisdom of having a credit card to their own future families. Interacting with their spouses and children will involve tons of new information that they will need to learn, respond to, and determine the implications of on a daily basis.

Ready to Answer God’s Call

God has some purpose in store for your children. They may find it today or not discover it until they’re thirty. The best way for you to prepare them for whatever God has for them is to teach them how to think, learn, and grow. There’s a lot you can teach them yourself, but you can’t possibly teach them all the adult life skills they need. There’s a lot they’re going to have to learn by themselves. But if you’ve been preparing them from the beginning, and if you’ve equipped them to learn, then you have equipped them for life.