Jenna

About Jenna

Jenna, lead copywriter at BJU Press, holds a BA in creative writing and an MA in English. Though her homeschooling experience was somewhat unstructured, she appreciates the flexibility of homeschooling since it allowed her to spend most of her time reading. Now Jenna enjoys reading and writing fiction in her spare time. Read more posts by Jenna.

Finding the Silent Night in the Busyness

December 20, 2019 by Jenna

How silent was the night of Jesus’s birth, really? Caesar Augustus’s census had brought many people to Bethlehem. The town was overcrowded. The animals would have been noisy around Jesus’s manger. Angels were singing and proclaiming in the fields. So most likely, all was not calm around the virgin mother and the holy infant. In fact, that night may have been one of the noisiest, most chaotic nights in Judea that year.

You might feel like the Christmas season is similarly chaotic for your family. Given all the holiday activities, volunteer opportunities, gifts to purchase and wrap, and visits with friends and family members, it’s no wonder we often feel like we need to do less during this season so we can focus more on the gift of Christ’s birth. But all of those things really are good, especially for creating lasting memories with your children. And you won’t find the silent night by not celebrating the season.

You’ll find the silent night in the stillness after the celebration. After you’ve reunited with friends and family, after you and your children have delighted in and rediscovered familiar stories and carols, after you’ve played and rejoiced through the day, that’s where the silent night will be. It’s in the faces of sleepy children when you tell them the story of Jesus’s birth and God’s most precious gift to His people. It’s in “the Son of God, love’s pure light,” who came to us at “the dawn of redeeming grace.”

Merry Christmas, from BJU Press!

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.

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.

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.

Mom-to-Mom: Tips for Homeschool Mompreneurs

October 8, 2019 by Jenna

Are you looking to join the ranks of homeschool entrepreneurs? Many homeschool moms become entrepreneurs by blogging, vlogging, running home shops, or even working a regular job from home. You’ve probably weighed out why you should or shouldn’t do it, but how do you manage it? How can you balance being a full-time homeschool mom and running a business? We asked two of our homeschool entrepreneurs for their go-to tips on balancing their businesses and their family lives.

Mom-to-Mom with Megan

1. Prioritize

Before you commit to any type of business, I would advise you to take some time to write out your priorities. It’s hard to balance a business, homeschooling, and church and home responsibilities. I learned early on that I can’t do everything. I found it helpful to have a list of personal nonnegotiables written down so that I can refer to them whenever I feel overwhelmed. Am I doing the really important things? I’ve had to ask myself that question many times, and you probably will too. If you’re neglecting some of your priorities, you may need to give something up or scale back your business.

2. Take Care of Yourself

Don’t forget that taking care of yourself needs to be on that nonnegotiable list. I have to admit that I am not very good at self-care. For a long time, I felt guilty for taking any time away from my kids to care for myself. But I’m learning that self-care is necessary if I’m going to be able to continue all the work I am called to. I am not somehow cheating my family if I get a babysitter and go get that overdue eye exam, get my hair cut, or take an aerobics class at my local gym. In fact, not doing those things—not taking care of myself—will likely result in my someday not being able to care for my family as I should. So be sure to put outings, exercise time, and routine medical appointments on your schedule—and don’t feel guilty about spending that time on yourself.

3. Teach Quiet Time

Teach your children how to be quiet. Only one of my children still takes naps every day, but all of them have quiet time. It’s an hour or so when they are allowed to read, write, color, or work on a project independently, but they’re not allowed to interrupt me or talk to each other. It’s good for them to have some quiet time every day. It’s also good for me because I get some uninterrupted time to make phone calls, research a topic, or whatever I need to do.

Mom-to-Mom with Jennifer

1. Personal Space

It’s important and helpful to have an allocated work space for your freelance or other work-at-home projects. Whether it’s an actual office or just a quiet nook in your bedroom, try to create a workspace that’s completely away from homeschool areas. This will help you avoid distractions so you can focus on your tasks. Also, try to keep all of your work-related items organized in one place (e.g., laptop, tablet, files, portfolios, etc.). That way they won’t get accidentally mixed in with school materials. Extra tip: I always keep hard copies of work assignments in a small notebook just in case of computer problems. As much as possible, choose a space that is relatively quiet, well-lit, and free of clutter. The fewer distractions around you, the better you will be able to concentrate on your work.

2. Work Time

It’s also important to keep work time separate from school time. Even if you’re a great multitasker, it’s difficult to juggle school and at-home work at the same time—one is bound to suffer at the expense of the other. Setting aside specific blocks of time for work will help you stay focused and productive. Looking ahead and planning your work schedule is also key. I usually follow the same procedure whenever I receive a new work assignment. First, I look at the date it’s due and enter it into my calendar on my phone.

Second, I look at our family’s schedule to see all our other activities and plan my work times around them. This is especially helpful because I know for certain which days I simply won’t have time to dedicate to my project. On the days I do have free for work, I carve out at least one or two hours for my assignment. I like to work ahead and complete my project a few days before it’s due so I can read over it a few times and make any necessary changes. When planning your work times, remember to remain flexible for your family. There will be times your work gets interrupted by a “Mommy/Daddy, can you help me?” As spouses and parents first, we need to be willing to put aside our work so we can take care of our family’s needs.

3. Mind the Gap

Keeping work spaces and times separate from school will greatly help you in completing your at-home work in an efficient and timely manner.

Megan homeschools her four daughters while working with BJU Press to provide blog posts and other written content. Jennifer homeschools her two daughters while also working with BJU Press as a blogger and writer. We love working with these two ladies and are thankful for all that they are able to contribute as both full-time moms and homeschool entrepreneurs.