BJU Press Blog

Jenna

Introducing the New American Literature Edition

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american-lit

We’re excited to introduce the newest edition of our American Literature textbook. The secondary-level language arts team has put in a lot of work to make this the most valuable edition for you and your child, and they’ve made a lot of changes based on your recommendations. Take a look at these exciting new features!

1. The Reading Process

Incorporating the Reading Process into the textbook has been the most significant revision so far. We believe the Reading Process will help you cultivate in your child a deeper understanding of how American culture has grown and developed since its beginning. For more information about the Reading Process, see “How to Teach Your Children to Read Actively” or take a look inside American Literature to see it applied.

2. Analyze, Read, and Evaluate

These three instructional strands (or lines of thought followed throughout the reading) help to establish the reader’s purpose for reading and guide him through each selection. The “analyze” strand focuses on technical elements, the “read” strand deals with reading strategies and approaches, and the “evaluate” strand develops biblical worldviews. All the instructional strands are marked by icons in both the Teacher’s Edition and the Student Text.

3. Expanded Content

Based on requests for greater diversity and modern content, we’ve expanded the content to include selections from more recent decades. Our team has also added selections that reflect the rich cultural diversity of America, such as “Go Down, Moses,” a Negro spiritual, and pieces from the Native American oral tradition, “How the World Began” and “The Constitution of the Five Nations.” We’ve also included new chapters on contemporary poetry and prose as well as “Voices of Conflict,” a chapter featuring selections from the Civil War era.

4. New Design

This is perhaps the most important revision for both you and your children. The textbook and teacher’s edition have been redesigned in order to make the information more accessible—from smaller changes like breaking the text up visually and reorganizing information to larger changes like adding author biographies before every selection, trimming down unit introductions, and adding chapter introductions.

The third edition of American Literature will be a treasure trove of literary selections for your children. Visit the product page to take a look inside the book.

How to Teach Your Children to Read Actively

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Children are born learning, so parents and teachers almost never work with a blank slate. We’re always building on some kind of a foundation that’s been laid down, and the most effective teaching takes place when we’re working directly with that foundation. You can’t build a house without first making sure that the foundation is ready. That’s why we begin teaching math with counting and teaching reading by connecting written words to spoken words.

teaching-reading

We should never hand a child a work of literature written long before he was born and expect him to be able to think deeply about the time period or the moral standards of the era without first laying the foundation for those thoughts. We rely on the Reading Process to lay the right foundation before asking deeper questions. Rather than allowing your children to be passive readers unable to form opinions because they lack the proper foundation, the Reading Process encourages your children to actively use the foundation laid for them. It involves three stages.

1. Before Reading

The first step in the reading process is to equip readers with the information they need to understand their first reading—this is the foundation of their reading. Your children will have the opportunity to build background knowledge about the time period, the author’s life, and the selection itself. But most importantly, your children should understand why they’re reading what they’re reading. This may mean using the reading selection to teach a specific literary device.

For example, before discussing Aesop’s fables, you might teach a brief lesson on metaphors, perhaps connecting your lesson to other familiar concepts such as Jesus’s parables or allegory in The Pilgrim’s Progress.

2. During Reading

The “during reading” stage encourages your children to stay focused on the central lesson—whatever you’re using the selection to teach—by asking them to recall information they learned in the first stage. Here, they’re building walls and support beams on their foundation. Instead of passively reading, your children should actively apply what they’ve learned to the selection as they read. One way to encourage this would be to ask them to highlight examples of the terms they learned before reading or to note when an author’s background might have affected his writing.

To continue your lesson on metaphors in fables, you might highlight a particular metaphor in the selection and ask your child to identify what kind of literary device is being used or what the metaphor represents.

3. After Reading

This final stage—putting on the roof—in the reading process ties the concepts your children learned before reading and applied during reading together by asking them to reread and discuss what they found in the selection after reading. Rather than just learning terms and finding examples within the selection, your children should begin discussing the significance of those terms in the context of the selection. This final step in the Reading Process trains your children to form opinions and support them with information from the selection.

Going back to the example with metaphors, you could discuss with your children the purpose of using a metaphor as a literary device in a fable or how metaphors can help them talk about difficult ideas more easily.

How well your children make connections between new information and old information can mean the difference between a forced discussion about literary devices in Aesop’s fables and a deeper discussion from “The Fox and the Grapes” about what kind of “sour grapes” your children may struggle with.

Take a look at how we apply the Reading Process in the newest edition of American Literature!

A Hands-on Approach to the Planning Stage

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Helping your children master writing skills presents a challenge when working with different learning styles. When I taught freshman English, my students were allowed to choose their own approach for planning. Some just made lists of questions while others constructed graphic organizers like bubble charts or word webs. They usually found ways to adapt the process to their own learning styles. But I often wondered how I could adapt the planning stage for hands-on learners.

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Maybe you’ve asked a similar question. Here’s one way you can help your child get a literal feel for the planning stage.

First, he’ll need a lot of notecards—3×5 cards cut in halves or fourths work best—and a pencil.

We’ll use the comparison-and-contrast essay and the sample brainstorming from chapter 3 of Writing & Grammar 12 as a foundation for this activity. (Example is from Student Worktext, page 64.)

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Next, instead of making an ordinary list, have your child write each new idea he has about roller coasters (or whatever other topic he chooses) on a notecard.

Once he has a good number of cards (fifteen to twenty would be a good start), have him sort through his cards, putting all the items of a similar nature together in the same pile. For example, we can categorize items such as height, speed, rough, and smooth from the list above as physical characteristics.

After sorting the cards into piles according to categories, he should label the back of each card according to the category it belongs to.

He may find that one of his ideas can act like a category itself, like kinds of seats with our roller coaster brainstorming. Or he might realize that some ideas don’t fit into any of his categories. Suggest that he spend more time thinking through these cards, just in case there are other ideas that he could connect the loose cards to. If there’s nothing else, let him return to his larger categories.

With a comparison-and-contrast essay, as in our example, your child would need to sort his cards down further into the categories of the two items he’s comparing—in this case, wooden roller coasters and steel roller coasters. In a different kind of essay, these larger categories could represent different major points in the argument and would be separated into sub-points.

From here, your child needs to make sure of the purpose of his essay. If he’s decided to prove that steel roller coasters are more fun than wooden ones, then he should look through his cards to see which of his categories support his position.

Finally, it’s time to organize the cards according to their strength. In writing, we often conclude with the strongest point because information given last is what readers remember best. If he’s decided that his strongest argument rests on a physical characteristic, he should put his cards from that category at the bottom of the stack.

When brainstorming on notecards, it’s easy for your child to handle the information in a more literal sense. He can rearrange and recategorize his ideas as he needs to, without the hassle and mess of crossing out and erasing. He can also add additional notes or pictures to his cards, or whatever helps him manipulate the information.

All our Writing & Grammar textbooks include detailed explanations for the planning stage of each writing assignment, and many of them have varying suggestions for different kinds of learners. Check out our complete line here!

3 Tips for Being Research Paper Ready

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The research paper is the most difficult part of any English course—almost universally dreaded because of its difficulty. Most students would rather avoid it. As much as students dislike doing the research paper, teaching and grading it is just as intimidating. While I was working on my MA in English, I was also a graduate assistant in the English department, and teaching and grading research papers became my life for the better part of two years. Even with my background in English, I had some of the same fears you probably have as you teach your child about research papers. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to answer my students’ questions or that I’d teach them wrong. Here are three helpful things I learned from teaching college freshmen about writing research papers.

Research-Papers

1. Assign More Than One Paper

I always handed out questionnaires on the first day of class to ask my students what kind of writing they had already done. I liked the interesting responses to that question. Some regularly wrote on a blog while others had written short stories. Almost invariably, the students who had written research papers regularly in high school (once a year or more) did better on their first college-level research paper than those who hadn’t.

You can encourage your child to develop his thinking by assigning different kinds of research papers, and not just for English class. You can assign comparison-contrast papers in history, persuasive papers in economics, argumentative papers in biology, analytical papers in literature, or simple informative papers in science.

2. Let Them Write About What They Like

Because of English department requirements, every student in my class had to write about energy technology and policy, a topic even I found boring. It was hard to watch students who were beginners at writing struggle with both a lack of understanding about writing as well as a strong dislike for the subject. If it’s your child’s first research paper, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have some fun with it.

Letting your children pick their own topics or assigning them a topic they’re interested in can be a great way to encourage them to write, especially if they’re reluctant or young writers. Though writers also need to know how to write well about topics they aren’t interested in, it’s better and more encouraging for them if their first experience with a high school assignment is on a topic they enjoy.

3. Require Them to Make a Good Outline

An outline can make or break a research paper. If the writer has a solid outline, he’ll have a solid paper. But if his outline is faulty, the paper won’t work. With fifty or more students, I couldn’t make sure every student had a good outline before I let them start writing the paper, but in a homeschool situation you can.

An outline is like a snapshot of the entire paper. It should quickly show the reader the overall structure of the paper—the argument, the reasons for that argument, and the support for those reasons. For most papers, the main points should all explain why the thesis is true. The subpoints all explain how the corresponding main point is true. If the outline includes sub-subpoints, these should show research that supports the how’s of the subpoints. If the main points and subpoints follow these guidelines, then the thought behind the paper should be accurate, and your child can focus on style and grammar as he presents the content. If the outline doesn’t follow these guidelines, then he isn’t ready to write yet. So make sure your child has the outlining done properly before writing the rest of the paper.

BJU Press’s Writing & Grammar courses put a strong emphasis on research paper writing and suggest many options for research papers in different subject areas.

Do you have any other research paper writing topics you’d like me to cover or tips you’d like to share? Feel free to comment with your questions or suggestions!

Applying Bloom’s Taxonomy

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As parents, you want your children to succeed in every area of their lives, and as home educators, you especially want them to succeed in their education. A good way to visualize your goals for your children’s education is through Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Dr. Benjamin Bloom described what he believed to be the best processes for learning. Though he identified three different domains of learning, we are all most familiar with the cognitive domain, which has to do with knowledge. Understanding his process can help you to fulfill the greater purpose of education—education isn’t just about learning facts and figures. It’s a process that continuously encourages children to grow and think critically. Bloom’s Taxonomy verbalizes the process so that we can aim for a clearer goal in education—being able to master concepts so that we can create new concepts.

BloomsTax

Since the best way to learn something is to see it applied, here is Bloom’s process for the cognitive domain applied to learning nouns. (To keep it simple, we’ll focus on the rule that says nouns are words that refer to persons, places, or things.)

Level One: Knowledge/Remembering

The first level focuses on facts and recall. It has nothing to do with what the rule means, implies, or suggests, it only focuses on knowing what the rule says. Our rule is “Nouns are words that refer to persons, places, or things.”

Level Two: Comprehension/Understanding

Comprehension is one step beyond simple recall. It demonstrates that you not only know what the rule is word for word, but you also know what those words mean and you can put the rule into your own words to express the same concept. To understand the “noun as a person, place, or thing” rule, you have to know what a person is, what a place is, and so on. Putting the rule into my own words, I might say that people’s names, specific or general locations, and objects are all referred to with nouns.

Level Three: Application/Applying

Level three begins the step where textbook practices and exercises come in. Here we take our rule and look at something it applies to. That means taking a sample sentence and finding and labeling all the nouns, based on our rule.

For example, “Amy (person) wanted to move back to Scotland (place), but her aunt (person) didn’t have enough money (thing) for the move (thing).”

Level Four: Analysis/Analyzing

Analysis involves grouping information into parts. It’s a question-and-answer process that might reveal more about our rule. When I put the rule into my own words, I changed things to objects because I felt that objects better indicates the tangible nature of things. But in the example sentence above, I’ve identified the second move as a noun, not a verb. Why is it a noun and not a verb? When we’re analyzing, we need to recognize that some words may be nouns that refer to persons, places, or things even if they’re normally used as a different part of speech. While we’re thinking about it, we may notice that we can classify the second move as a noun, but not the first one.

Levels Five and Six: Evaluation/Evaluating and Synthesis/Creating

Originally, Bloom’s fifth level was synthesis, and his sixth was evaluation. But a group of Bloom’s former students revised his original process in the 1990s. Under the revised version, evaluating became the fifth level, and creating became the sixth.

Evaluating involves forming conclusions based on new and prior knowledge and being able to support those conclusions with that knowledge. Here we should be able to look at what we discovered in our analysis step and explain why we came to the conclusion that we did. In the example sentence above, we know that move usually indicates an action, like when we first used it, but the second time it’s used in a tangible, countable sense, not as an action.

This step marks the end of most forms of practice exercises in many textbooks. But we need to go on to the last level in order to demonstrate true knowledge of a concept.

The final level in the revised model is creating. Creating requires using all prior knowledge in order to form a new idea. It goes beyond reading a new sentence and identifying parts of speech. Creation demonstrating a mastery of nouns would require putting together a new sentence using nouns intentionally and naturally. For example, in the following sentence, I’ve created a situation to use words that would often act as verbs (love and traveling) as nouns in order to show what we discovered about things.

“Amy decided that her love of traveling was more important to her than her love of Scotland.”

Bloom’s process relies on a widening foundation of knowledge, and BJU Press homeschool curriculum references the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, especially in math and vocabulary. Check out our math curriculum or vocabulary curriculum to see how we do it!