This season is a time for many things. It’s a time for colored lights, sparkling trees, warm drinks, favorite songs, and—hopefully—gently falling snow.
But most importantly, this is the season to rejoice over the greatest blessing of all: Jesus Christ came to live among us. And through His sacrifice we have comfort and joy. Enjoy this Christmas ecard from all of us at BJU Press! (Download the image for your devices.)
Image by Toa Heftiba
As much as you may love being a part of your child’s daily walk with God and carefully teaching him to seek God, it has always been your goal as a parent to carefully guide him to a place where he will be able to seek God on his own. You won’t always be standing over his shoulder and telling him what decisions he needs to make—as much as you might want to.
One day, your child’s relationship with the Lord will be his own responsibility. Education is no different. Just as you want your children to be capable of making right choices on their own, you want them to be able to learn on their own.
The process of developing a child into an independent learner is sometimes called “scaffolding.” Often when you see a building under construction, you also see scaffolding around it. The wooden or metal framework supports the workers as they build the structure itself. For example, a bricklayer stands on a scaffold as he works on the exterior walls of a building. Though essential to the construction process, the scaffolding is only temporary.
Scaffolding in education works the same way. The teacher or parent provides support and makes connections to help learners continue making progress independently. Here are a couple of ways you can help your children become independent learners.
Have you ever told a funny story only to get to the end and realize that no one’s laughing? And then you remembered one small but crucial detail that changed everything about the story and made it funny?
One of the most important elements for any lesson is appropriate background information—which can sometimes be that small but crucial missing detail that keeps your children from understanding a new concept—like knowing a particular word’s definition before you can understand a scientific law. If they have all the information but still don’t understand, help them make the connection between what they already know and what they need to learn.
Sometimes, this part of scaffolding is as simple as reminding your children of the necessary information. Other times, it might mean referring back to previous discussions or asking a specific question about the missing information. You could also use graphic organizers, word webs, vocabulary lists, or even a metaphor to help make connections to ideas your children already understand, such as the comparison between your child’s growing faith and his education, or the funny story with the missing detail.
Once your children have made the connection they were missing before, look back and see what methods helped them find it. Did a graphic organizer help them understand what a verb does? Or did using a word web help them brainstorm for a writing project? Teach them to look for those methods and apply them the next time they don’t understand a new concept.
Scaffolding isn’t a list of tools to use all the time. It’s a process for reaching the specific goal of making sure your children can learn independently. BJU Press Teacher’s Editions are full of resources that can help you scaffold your children’s learning.
Check out our TEs for science or English for some extra resources that will help your children become independent learners!
For a busy parent, with everything that has to be completed in one homeschool day, teaching writing and grammar is a lot of work. It might seem to make more sense for you to handle these two related subjects as separate classes, or to spend one semester on grammar and the next on writing. So why does BJU Press put them together in the curriculum? Because writing and grammar are two halves of the same whole. Studying grammar helps your child become a better writer, while studying writing helps your child understand grammar. Here are a few reasons why.
Writing assignments give your child a place to apply the grammar skills he’s just learned. It’s easy for a student to recognize and fix a problem he’s just learned about when looking at a list of sentences that follow a certain formula. The real test of understanding is expecting him to recognize and correct the problem in his own writing. But the reverse is also true—grammar skills improve writing. Writers need a certain level of grammatical understanding in order to be able to communicate effectively. For example, punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence entirely, as in the old joke about the trigger-happy panda that “eats, shoots and leaves.”
People tend to be either analytical or conceptual. Grammar is an analytical skill, and children who favor logical processes tend to do well with grammar. On the other hand, writing is highly conceptual. There are fewer hard-and-fast rules for writing, and children who tend to be conceptual thinkers are likely to succeed in writing. Studying writing and grammar together gives both kinds of thinkers opportunities to use their strengths and improve their weaknesses.
Since writing is so conceptual, it can also be frustratingly subjective to assess, but this subjectivity leaves room for leniency in grading. When I was teaching writing, I would often ask myself whether lack of sentence variety or overuse of weak verbs really deserved a lower grade even though everything else was well done. But you know your own child’s strengths and weaknesses. If your child enjoys writing but doesn’t excel at spelling or grammar (the objective part), you can choose to value the writing section (the subjective part) of the rubric over the grammar section. If your child does well grammatically but doesn’t write as well, then you can choose to emphasize the grammar section of the rubric. This gives you the flexibility to evaluate your child based on his strengths rather than his weaknesses.
At BJU Press, we teach writing and grammar together all the way from grade 2 through grade 12. Check out our whole line of English-Writing and Grammar textbooks!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!