BJU Press Blog

Jenna

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.

21st Century Skills and 21st Century Homeschooling (Part 2)

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21st century skills and homeschooling
What do your children need to be able to do in order for them to be prepared for their future jobs? In a previous post, we explored some of the 21st century skills that educators have identified as key for students’ success and that we believe will help students be effective servants of Christ, their families, their communities, and their employers.

21st Century Skills: The Literacy Skills

These three skills—information literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy—have to do with a person’s ability to find and process information.

Information Literacy

Information literacy is the ability to process information in many different formats. Being able to read informational texts is part of this skill, but there is more to it. If your kids use textbooks, they’re already using informational texts all the time. But they should also be able to use visual analysis, or the process of reading graphs, charts, and other visual forms of data for information. For example, students should be able to understand commonalities from a Venn diagram or see sequences in a timeline.

Media Literacy

Media literacy is the ability to find different kinds of information and knowing how to use those sources effectively. In the information age, we’re surrounded by information all the time, but it’s not always accurate. We often hear facts or details second or third hand and out of context. Children need to learn how to find reliable sources for their information.  But given the constantly changing nature of information today, reliable and unreliable sources come and go. Wikipedia was once universally considered an unreliable source, but today, most people will admit that it’s usually reliable. To be able to keep up, children will need to learn principles for determining reliable sources. For example, does the source include citations for where information came from? Does it address both sides of an issue?

Technology Literacy

Technology literacy is perhaps the skill most closely related to the 21st century. This type of literacy is the ability to use the available technologies. New technologies are just resources, but they can be incredibly powerful ones for those that know how to use them. The best way to learn about technology is to use it. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to enroll your children in a computer programming course. You can simply encourage their curiosity and give them time with the technology. How many dozens of timesaving features are buried in the average word processor that we don’t know about simply because we haven’t explored it?

21st Century Skills: Life Skills

The life skills—flexibility, leadership, initiative, productivity, and social skills—often have more to do with a person’s character than with his or her learning or ability. Some of these skills are the natural outflow of some of the learning skills, and all of these skills require active modeling in real life.

Flexibility

Flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances with grace and understanding. It has as much to do with how we respond to change as it does with our willingness to change. Flexibility has a lot in common with collaboration. As children work with other people, they need to learn how to adjust their plans and their approach to meet others’ needs. If they learn best while listening to music, and they have a roommate who can’t concentrate with music, then they can be flexible by listening on headphones or going to another room to study. The process of working with people and listening and understanding their needs is the best way to build a flexible character.

Leadership

Leadership, at its core, is simply the ability to motivate others to work together. Children can practice it by demonstrating confidence in their abilities and the abilities of others so that they can accomplish a goal together. This skill also relies on both collaboration and communication, because to learn leadership, children must learn to trust in the abilities of others so they can be confident about those abilities, and they must be able to communicate their own skills and abilities.

Initiative

Initiative is the willingness to fix a problem without an immediate reason to do so. It’s when your children do their chores without you telling them to, or when they pick up trash on the sidewalk simply because it’s a problem they could fix. Students need to learn to fix problems if they can, or to point them out if nobody has noticed them. Initiative is less a skill to be practiced and more a life philosophy that you can instill in your children.

Productivity

Productivity, also called efficiency, is the ability to apply time management skills in order to accomplish more. It requires self-awareness as much as it requires knowing how to plan and effectively manage your time. For example, if you know you never look at or use planners, why would you use up time to put a whole lesson plan in a planner? Similarly, your children need to know how they work and learn best so they can implement a time management plan that works for them.

Social Skills

Social skills are simply the ability to be likeable—to present yourself well and to have awareness of what is or isn’t appropriate in a given setting. These skills also relate closely to communication skills. It’s much easier for kids to be likeable when they speak clearly and understandably. You don’t need to teach your children how to small talk. But they do need to learn how to listen and engage in a conversation that they may not have any initial interest in. They also need to learn how to have an appropriate conversation. Anyone who’s spent a few minutes with children knows they have few boundaries. They’ll share anything and ask anything. Awareness of what’s appropriate for conversation isn’t innate, nor is it universal.

Are these 21st century skills just another checklist to work through to ensure that you’re giving your children the best possible education? No. These skills are actually the foundations of a different way of looking at school. You may have noticed that most of these skills aren’t skills kids are going to learn from what we know as a traditional school experience—reading, lecture, homework, and repeat. But that is a conversation for a future post.

21st Century Skills for 21st Century Homeschooling (Part 1)

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21st century skills in your homeschool

Do you know what one of the most wonderful things about homeschooling is? You have the freedom to be flexible and mobile and do whatever you need to do to ensure that your children will be equipped for their future lives. If you aren’t part of an online academy or a school with strict regulations, then you are free to buy curriculum directly from the curriculum creators. Which means, once those resources are in your home, you get to use them however you like. You can focus on the lessons and skills that you believe will be the most beneficial for your children’s future. You can choose resources that will help them become more effective servants of Christ, their family, their community, and their employer.

So what do you need to teach your kids to be more effective servants in the 21st century? Educators have compiled a list of skills that are vital for students to be successful in their future jobs. Realistically, these 21st century skills (as they are often called) have always been important for preparing students for their lives. However, as people create, innovate, and streamline technology, fewer jobs require mindless drones who just follow instructions. To be effective employees, people will need to be able to create and innovate. The 21st century skills are the skills that most effectively equip students for their future jobs.

When the BJU Press writing teams look at incorporating 21st century skills into our textbooks, they divide them into three categories: the learning skills, the literacy skills, and the life skills. In this post we’ll take a look at the first category of skills.

21st Century Skills: The Learning Skills

These skills are ones that we are always learning and developing, and they’re the ones we’re most familiar with.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is using reasoning skills to determine the implications of information. It’s the crucial step between learning facts and understanding why that information is important. For example, students can learn that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914. But then the students should consider how his assassination led to World War I. In our materials, we rely on effective questioning to develop critical thinking. Children need to go beyond just remembering, understanding, and applying information. They also need to be able to analyze and evaluate it, and the process of analysis and evaluation requires them to use their critical-thinking skills.

Creativity

Creativity as a learning skill does not refer to artistry but, rather, creative thinking. Creative thinking is the ability to use what you know in a new situation to solve a problem or to answer a question that you don’t know. We have a tendency to think that creative thinking is only an innate ability, not a skill to be practiced and taught. But kids learn to be creative thinkers by attempting to solve problems without being told how to solve them.

This ability requires confidence and a certain disregard for failure. If you’re going to try proposing new solutions to problems, you have to accept that your solution might not work. And that’s okay. You just try again until something works. Asking your children to define words they haven’t seen or heard before is asking them to think creatively. They’ll need to be able to use what they know about words and word roots, combine it with what they know from the word’s context, and then create a definition in their own words.

Collaboration

Collaboration is the skill of working with other people and learning how to compromise for everyone’s benefit. If you have more than one child, you’re probably already working on developing their collaboration skills. It’s a fact of life for siblings. However, they’ll need to be able to collaborate on a professional level as well as a personal one. Group projects are especially helpful to teach students how to listen to others, share ideas, and encourage each other to be useful, contributing members of a team. Children who work and learn together have a unique advantage over those who always work and learn alone. They’re able to recognize how people can work differently but still be effective. And they’re also able to adjust their own processes to accommodate those who work differently.

Communication

Communication is the ability to clearly and conscientiously express what you need or expect from others. It is not just the ability to speak and talk to others. Many people have the ability to speak but have little skill in expressing their thoughts clearly or conscientiously. Students learn this skill best through practice as well as example. English courses teach grammar and writing skills that ensure children can use the words they need in the way those words should be used, and critical-thinking questions help them practice putting their thoughts and ideas into words. But communication is a skill that also needs to be reinforced daily. You can demonstrate it by showing your children how the things they say can be misunderstood and then helping them to clarify. You can also demonstrate by clarifying your own communication.

These learning skills are just the beginning, but they play a role in the development of some of the other 21st century skills. In a future blog post, we’ll discuss the remaining two categories of 21st century skills: literacy skill and life skills.

Preparing Children for Sophisticated Unbelief

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Heidi St. John and Renton Rathbun on sophisticated unbelief
In April, Renton Rathbun, a former college professor and current Biblical Worldview Specialist at BJU Press, joined Heidi St. John on her podcast. They came together to talk about the agenda of secular colleges and universities to undermine the faith of their students. While that agenda is very real, it may not manifest itself in the way you might expect. Christian young people are expecting to go into secular universities, trade schools, and work places and have their faith blatantly mocked or rejected. But what they encounter is something that Renton calls sophisticated unbelief.

Sophisticated unbelief is a tactic that university professors take towards students with faith-based backgrounds. They come alongside these students and appear to support and value faith while also emphasizing that that student’s faith does not apply in the classroom.

The Dangers of Sophisticated Unbelief

These professors will be genuine, likeable, intelligent, and approachable people. These men and women are not villains who will publically mock and condemn your children for their beliefs. In fact, they will see themselves as the heroes your children need. From their perspective, they’re there to rescue your children from a primitive and backwards worldview. The danger comes in when they divide what they’re teaching in the classroom from your children’s biblical worldview. They want your children to have a two-story view of the world, because if they can disconnect the secular world from the Christian world, your children won’t be able to argue about where their worldview applies. And if your children aren’t prepared to encounter sophisticated unbelief, it’s easy for them to see how this intelligent and friendly new authority in their lives might be right about some things.

The Solution

As Renton points out, the best defense is to teach your children to truly study the Scriptures. Not just to know the Scriptures, but to see how they connect to all areas of their lives—math,  science, history, and the English language arts. And to do that, they will need to be able to apply critical thinking skills to the Scriptures and to the subjects that they’re studying.

Studying the Bible and developing thinking skills will enable your children to defend their faith. Listen to the full discussion between Renton and Heidi for more!

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!