BJU Press Blog

Beat the Heat Summer Activities for Kids

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summer activities for kids
Summer is a time to get outside and enjoy the warm weather and sunshine. But what about those days when it’s just too hot or illness forces you to stay indoors? Here are some awesome indoor and outdoor summer activities for kids that help you beat the heat.

Mentos Geyser

This one is perfect for the backyard! All you need is a bottle of Diet Coke and some Mentos (at least half a pack). You can also use a geyser tube, which improves the effect, but it’s optional. Best of all, you are actually teaching about chemical reactions with this explosive activity! Find all the instructions for this experiment right here. And, if the kids get all messy in the explosion, you can have fun hosing everyone off.

Frozen Paint Cubes

Use an old ice tray to freeze diluted watercolors, and then let your kids have fun painting with the ice cubes as they melt! This summer activity is also great for the backyard. All you need is the ice tray and watercolors, and a large roll of craft paper to spread over the grass or patio.

Bikes and Bubbles

Maybe your kids are reluctant riders, but they won’t be any more with this summer activity! Purchase a bubble blower or use your own bubble-blowing expertise to create a haze of bubbles across a quiet neighborhood street or bike path. Your kids will enjoy riding through the bubbles over and over! For even more fun, angle a sprinkler across the path so your kids can ride their bikes through it and stay cool.

Indoor Scavenger Hunt

Design a scavenger hunt that will keep your kids busy all morning—or at least for an hour. You can use objects readily available in your home, or plant certain items for the kids to find. Create a scavenger hunt list, maybe with creative clues for them to decipher. This idea is very flexible, and setup can be adapted to fit the time and energy you have.

Indoor Laser Maze

Do you have a hallway in your home? Use painter’s tape and string or yarn to create a laser maze zigzagging across the length of it! Your kids will have fun trying to get through the maze without touching or pulling down the string “lasers.” The best part is that you can tweak the design over and over to make it more challenging and keep their interest.

Paper Plate Skating

Got hardwood or vinyl floors? Use dryer sheets or paper plates as “skates,” and let the kids skate around on them. Add interest with a little music in the background and an obstacle course to skate around. Or turn off the lights and mark out a path with glow sticks!

With a little imagination and these cool summer activities, you can beat the heat anytime!

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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.

3 Tips for Transitioning to Year-Round Homeschooling

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switching to year-round homeschooling
A couple of years ago, my husband and I decided to dramatically change our homeschooling routine. We moved from homeschooling using a traditional school year calendar to homeschooling year-round. I wrote about the reasons we chose to move to a year-round schedule in the post “3 Reasons to Homeschool Year Round.”

We have not regretted our choice to homeschool year-round, but the transition was a bit challenging. If you’re considering switching to year-round homeschooling, here are some tips to help you on your way.

Plan Your Calendar

Set Up a Routine

Homeschooling year-round will give you a lot of flexibility with your schedule, but you still need a plan. You still must meet your your required number of days or hours. I do recommend setting up a routine—it will help your child immensely to know what you expect on any given day. Some families choose to homeschool five days a week for a set number of weeks and then take a week or two off. My family has adopted a four-day-a-week schedule, and we try to take the same day off every week.

Plan Time Between School Years

It will also help your family if you plan a multi-week break between school years. I have found that I need time to mentally wrap up our school year, pack away any curriculum I hope to reuse in the future, and give myself a “breather” before starting all over again. I usually plan on a four to five week break between school years. Having that longer break also gives a “freshness” to the new school year that allows me to make changes to old routines more easily.

Communicate Your Homeschool Plan

If you are planning to homeschool year-round, you will want to communicate your plans to any homeschool umbrella organizations that you may be a part of. My family is a part of the Academy of Home Education (AHE), and every year we email AHE a copy of our planned yearly homeschool calendar which we usually create in Excel. Based on our calendar, AHE adjusts our reporting deadlines so that we don’t incur late fees.

Anticipate the Need for Adjustments

Adjust Your Curriculum

You will have to make some adjustments along the way. For example, the BJU Press spelling curriculum is set up for a five-day school week, which did not fit well with our four-day week. In order to avoid the possibility of having to take a spelling test after a three-day break from school, we decided that we needed to do spelling five days a week, even on our “day off.” It was an easy adjustment.

Adjust Your Grade Reporting

We also had to make some adjustments to our grading and reporting. Our quarters are usually 11 to 12 calendar weeks long, which at first glance, doesn’t fit very well with the nine-week grade reporting forms required by our homeschool organization. But this was an easy fix as well—we just ignored the calendar’s weekly divisions and counted every five days as a “week.”

Our family has really been blessed by year-round homeschooling, and I’m sure yours will be as well. I hope that some of these tips will make your transition easier. If you still need help, reach out to one of your local HomeWorks consultants—they are there for you!

The Building Blocks to Teaching Literature

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teaching literature
If you love reading, you probably get excited about the idea of teaching reading and literature to your children. But literature can be one of the hardest subjects to teach well. The study of literature should open a student’s mind to new cultures, new perspectives, and new ideas. It should give students insight into experiences they aren’t likely to have. And it should challenge students to recognize biblical and unbiblical thinking in what they’re reading. It takes more than just a reading assignment and a list of comprehension questions to accomplish all that.

Teaching Literature with the Terms

Just like with poetry, you’ll need to build a foundation of terms you can use to talk about what your children are reading. Symbolism, satire, and allusion are all tools that writers use to tell their stories. Satire can help readers to reconsider the way they look at the world. Symbolism adds depth and meaning to stories. Allusion adds unity to a literary work by connecting different elements of the story.

Setting the Stage

You’ll also need to set the stage for your children. A writer’s history and family background has a huge influence on his or her literary work. Not only that, but the culture writers live in also affects how and what they write. Perhaps our children’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren will one day study the popularity of dystopian fiction in the late 20th century and early 21st century and what that says about how we think and believe as a culture.

Asking Thinking Questions

Once you’ve equipped your children with the relevant terminology and background, they should really think about what they’ve read. Those questions about who did what in a story are great for determining if your children understood what they read on a surface level, but they don’t get your child thinking about what’s below the surface. Asking what kind of creature Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is isn’t like asking what 499 ÷ 7 is. The math question requires a student to use and apply math skills to show understanding. The literature question only demonstrates recall. As your children progress in reading comprehension, questions should focus less on recall and more on critical thinking development. Focusing on critical thinking questions also helps make reading and literature lessons more interesting.

Confronting Unbiblical Thinking

Sadly, your children will not be able to go their whole lives without reading something that supports an unbiblical worldview. News articles, blogs, and even children’s books will support views you may not agree with—even something innocuous as “it’s ok to tell white lies to not hurt your friend’s feelings.” Those unbiblical concepts won’t be explicitly stated. Your children will need to learn to identify worldview implications so that they can respond appropriately. Studying literature can give your children the perfect opportunity to practice that kind of worldview discernment.

Recognizing God’s Design in Literature

Have you ever read about themes and symbolism in a certain piece of literature and thought “Maybe the author wasn’t thinking that at all”? It’s a tempting—and realistic—thought. As a writer myself, I enjoy using literary tools, but in general, my first priority is telling a good, cohesive story, not burying hidden meanings in what colors I use. But it’s undeniable that there is a unity of design in every work of literature—even if that unity is unintentional or accidental. You can find meaningful symbolism in seemingly random works, and you can trace themes in even the most chaotic literature. No matter how random a work of literature may seem, the image of God in the author—however marred—will come through in the writing. As we’re teaching literature, we can study man’s creative designs, and we can grow to appreciate God’s grand design as the ultimate Creator.

The BJU Press Approach to Phonics

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bju press approach to phonicsFor most of us, by the time we reach adulthood, reading comes naturally. We don’t have to think about which letters make what sounds or the rules for making different sounds. We just read. But then you look at your young children who have only been talking for a short while. How do you even begin to teach them to read? Naturally, the ABCs are a great place to start, but what comes after that? What is phonics and how are you supposed to teach it?

BJU Press’s approach to phonics in early learning and Grade 1—and even beyond to Grade 3—is fairly straightforward. If your children can talk, then they already know most of the words that they’ll be reading. You just need to give them the tools to read them.

Laying the Groundwork with Fun and Games

As a homeschool parent, you might hear a lot about sneaky learning—the idea of hiding learning opportunities in games and activities that your kids enjoy. But when your kids are just learning to read, there’s no point in hiding learning because all they do is learn, and most of the things they do are fun and games. All you need to do is direct them towards fun that will prepare them for future learning. Songs that teach rhymes, alphabet games, tracing activities, even reading to them while they look over your shoulder all help prepare your kids for the next step in learning to read. And it sets up a strong foundation to build on.

That’s why each of BJU Press’s early learning programs—Pathways for Preschool, Footsteps for Fours, and Focus on Fives—focuses heavily on activities, games, and characters that will keep children engaged and prepare them for learning.

Building Awareness

Why do you spend so much time laying the groundwork? You’re helping your children associate the sounds they hear and use to communicate with the letters and words they see on the page. It’s a big step from auditory and oral functions to visual functions.

Letter Sound Associations

Before they can read words, they’ll need to identify the sounds they hear. And that requires phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and recognize the individual sounds, or phonemes, that make up words. The s sound, the i sound, and the t sound in sit, for example. In Focus on Fives, Phonics 1, and English 1, we use numerous strategies for building phonemic awareness, including phonics stories and characters, phonics songs, rhyming songs, and read-alouds.

Manipulating Sounds

But phonemic awareness goes beyond just recognizing sounds. It’s also about being able to use and manipulate them. If your child knows the letter sounds for sit, as well as other consonant sounds, he or she can manipulate those consonant sounds into other members of the _it word family. With phonemic awareness and word families, children can learn proper pronunciation and find meaning rapidly. For children learning phonics, the words they’re starting with are usually words they already know. They need to be able to associate the letters they don’t know with the sounds they do know, so it’s less about building vocabulary and more about being able to decode sounds from letters. As they learn new sounds, they can practice combining letters and sounds into real words, and even find new words by looking for familiar patterns.

Keeping It Fun

Instead of teaching one word at a time, you’re equipping your children with the tools they need for reading all kinds of words. Tools like short and long vowels, consonant blends, r-influenced words, special vowel sounds, silent consonants, suffixes, and syllable division. Of course, most of these tools don’t have much meaning to a 5- or a 6-year-old who’s learning to read. That’s where we bring the fun back in with characters and games. Mr. Short, Miss Long, Marker E, Bossy R, and Miss Silent all give engaging visual cues that help your children learn and remember.

Reading Readiness

The goal of phonics instruction is for your children to be ready to read with comprehension and confidence. But teaching phonics alone can’t get you all the way there. Your children will also need opportunities to apply phonics principles in reading lessons. One key to that will be a phonics and reading program that supports them as they develop their skills. In Focus on Fives, we teach phonics and reading together, but in Grade 1, phonics and reading are two correlated subjects, and children practice and apply their skills separately. We continue to support phonics through Reading 3. Additionally, your children will need regular opportunities to read silently to develop reading comprehension, and to read orally to develop fluency. When children practice reading aloud, they learn to apply speaking rules (pauses, emphasis, and pacing) to their reading, adding depth and meaning. This kind of practice also improves their ability to communicate verbally.

Ultimately, you are preparing your children to read the Bible with confidence and clarity so that they can build their worldview on its principles. The way there is just one step after another. Your kids will be life-long readers before you know it!

Research Papers: Embrace the Opportunities

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research papers and their opportunities

Sometimes, I feel like people don’t talk enough about research papers or give them enough credit. They might just be one of the most valuable learning opportunities you can give your children. After all, isn’t learning about a topic, knowing how to gather reliable information about that topic, formulating an opinion about it, and logically supporting that opinion with facts exactly what you want your children to be able to do?

Unfortunately, we’ve all seen—or written—one of those research papers that was all fluff, no substance, and somehow still got a good grade. I will readily admit that I’ve written a few of those myself. Obviously, the writer didn’t really learn anything, so what’s the point of assigning it? Research papers shouldn’t be just busywork. Each research paper you present to your kids is a beautiful opportunity for them to apply all the lessons you’ve been working on this year. And for you, a research paper is an opportunity to see how well your children have learned.

The Opportunity for Application

Science courses don’t include labs just for fun. Math courses don’t give math problems just to make it hard. Students need a chance to apply what they’ve learned in a new way so that it really sticks. And that’s as true for writing and reasoning skills as it is for the water cycle or long division. In a research paper, students can use those grammar rules they’ve learned to clearly communicate what they’re thinking. And, as they practice formulating an argument, they can use what they’ve learned about logical fallacies to make their argument strong.

Now, perhaps you think that the application questions in your child’s grammar workbook are enough. But applying grammar or logic rules to a sentence you’re expecting to be wrong is different from using those rules while you’re writing. Writers don’t think about the rules as they’re writing; they’re thinking about the next point they need to make or how thoughts connect. When you see your children’s writing, you’ll be able to know whether they really understand the rule. A research paper is a real-life, low-stakes opportunity to apply the rules—good practice for a job application letter or college entrance exam.

The Opportunity to Practice Critical Thinking

When students do a research paper properly, a lot of thought goes into the process. What kinds of information will validly support their thesis? How will they address information that contradicts their thesis? In addition to shaping their argument, they’re going to have to find and address questions that they might not expect. If they’ve never written a longer paper, they will need to learn how to adjust their process to account for the greater detail they’ll need. But it goes beyond just crafting the argument and planning out the project.

Researching also demands critical thinking skills. Remember that old saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink? You can write book after book about research techniques and finding information, but it’s all useless if the students don’t read comprehensively and consider the meaning. To research any topic, students need to actually think about the information they’re reading—which is something you often try to have your children do in a literature course. When they’re looking for information that supports an argument, it demands a whole new level of reading comprehension. I’ve had countless students who cited inappropriate sources for support because they didn’t actually read what their sources said. A research paper will tell you whether your children have developed their reading comprehension well enough to read information critically and apply it to their argument.

The Opportunity for Excitement

Have you ever found that, after spending hours on a single topic, you develop a unique interest in that topic? Writing about anything will leave that kind of impact. No matter what your feelings were about a topic before you decided to write about it, once you’ve spent hours researching it, developing an opinion, and writing and rewriting your argument, you’re going to have an interest in it and—dare I say?—an excitement about it. The same thing happens for your children when they write a research paper. They might not admit it. They might not follow up on that interest. But in the process, they will come away knowing something new.

While it is important to allow your children to write about what they love, they also need to be able to embrace a new, unfamiliar subject. Research papers are a valuable way to introduce children to new topics—even though they may not want that introduction.

In your homeschool, every chapter, every lesson, and every assignment is another opportunity for your children. Research papers may be a more challenging opportunity, but clear communication, reasoning skills, and learning are worth the effort.