BJU Press Blog

Simplified Homeschool

You know that organization is the key to a smooth homeschool day. We share tips on planning your time and lessons as well as advice from other homeschool parents. There are also highlights from our Distance Learning daily video-lesson program, which is designed to simplify your homeschool.

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When Homeschooling Gets Hard

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homeschool encouragement on a bench
Sometimes homeschooling is not fun.

Like when you’ve been up most of the night with a sick baby. Or when you have serious cabin fever after being stuck inside for days. Or when your to-do list is overwhelming you—again.

In the craziness of trying to manage a busy household, sometimes it is tempting to look for an easier way. A different schooling option. A curriculum that requires less work from me.

I’ve had moments when I’ve wanted to completely abandon this homeschooling adventure, and if you’ve homeschooled for any length of time, you’ve probably have had those moments too.

But then there are moments that remind me why I started on this homeschooling journey in the first place. For example, before Christmas, my third grader and I were reading an article in Reading 3 about astronauts and what they thought about God. After reading Gherman Titov’s remarks about how he hadn’t seen anyone out there in space so he couldn’t believe in God, my daughter stopped reading and said, “Well, of course, he couldn’t see God! God is a Spirit.”

And that wasn’t the only clue that she was beginning to see the world through a biblical worldview. One day, when we were on our way to our weekly piano lesson, she told me,  “Even though I’m not very good at piano yet, maybe someday I’ll be able to play well enough to play hymns so other people can sing along to worship God.”

It’s sometimes tempting to think of homeschooling as a burden. But it’s not. Homeschooling is an investment. It’s an investment that costs me significant time and resources. But it’s worth it. My daughter is worth it. She’s getting more than just a quality education. She’s learning how to view the world around her through scriptural eyes. That’s the most important thing I could ever teach her.

Weary mom, take heart. You will never regret the investment that you make in your child. The days may be long now, but you, your children, and even your grandchildren will reap the benefits of your investment for years to come.

2018 Homeschool Catalog Highlights

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homeschool catalog
Our 2018 homeschool catalog is off the press and will show up soon in your mailbox. We’re excited about what BJU Press families did to make this year’s catalog more engaging. Back in October, we asked you to photograph your homeschool in action. The results were overwhelming and fun! Here’s just one example.

New Distance Learning Courses

As a homeschool dad, I’m thrilled to see how the self-paced video courses enable my daughter to take ownership of the learning. My wife and I still have final say over the activities and the grades, but with a flexible roadmap, my third grader can learn on her own and at her own pace.

This year BJU Press is rolling out eight new distance learning courses. You can see sample lessons for each course on YouTube.

Heritage Studies 1

This 90-day course is taught by Mrs. Lawson and walks young children through civics starting in the home and expanding through communities and states to our nation. It concludes with a brief introduction to early American history, beginning with Columbus and finishing with Plymouth.

Science 2

Mrs. Overly teaches second graders simplified science skills and scientific methods so that they learn to be student scientists. They practice their skills in exposure-level discussions of earth science, biology, anatomy, and physical science. This is also a 90-day course.

Spelling 3

Students develop spelling skills as they inductively study word families. Mrs. Jarrell’s instruction also strengthens children’s proofreading and writing skills in this 180-day course.

Fundamentals of Math

Mr. Harmon’s personality engages students in this 180-day seventh-grade level course on math. Students will master the knowledge and skills they developed in sixth grade, providing them with a strong foundation for advanced math in high school.

World Studies

In this 180-day course, Miss Ingersoll provides students with a survey of world history from the Middle Ages to the present. Seventh graders will learn to think critically from a biblical worldview as they learn about the religions, movements, and philosophies that continue to shape our world today.

Earth Science

Geology is a field that’s dominated by secular thought, but Mrs. Gillenwater directs eighth-grade students to geology from a biblical worldview. This 180-day course also covers the atmosphere and space.

Geometry

Mr. Matesevac guides tenth graders in developing higher-level thinking skills. Students incrementally learn how to construct geometric proofs. This is a 180-day course.

American Government

In this capstone heritage studies course, Mrs. Bullock walks students through how our government was formed and the way it functions. The in-depth examination of our nation’s government is guided by a biblical worldview. This is a 90-day course.

• Price Drop for Spelling and Handwriting Video Lessons

If you’re considering buying spelling or handwriting video courses, be aware that they are now more affordable. We’ve dropped the prices for the spelling (1 through 6) and handwriting video courses from $299 per course to $149 per course.

• Vocabulary Now in Textbook Grade Kits

For the first time, we’re including vocabulary in textbook grade kits. This rounds out language arts for seventh–twelfth graders.

• Deeper Discount on Textbook Kits

When you purchase a grade or subject textbook kit, you can have the confidence that you have all of the items needed to teach your child. We’ve always discounted books when you buy them in kits. Three years ago, we evened out the discount to 20%. So purchasing kits cost 20% less than purchasing items in the kit individually. This year, we discounted the prices even more. Kits are now 25% less than purchasing the items individually.

• Lower Testing Prices

This year we’ve dropped the prices of Iowa and Stanford 10 achievement tests by 15%. This is good news for families, especially when you’re testing multiple children. Remember that many states require testing. If you’re planning on testing your children this year because your state requires it or if you do it for your own benefit, this is a great time to order—before the busiest season kicks in.

Invisible Subjects: Taking Time for Heart Matters

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heart matters with mom
On paper, your homeschool day is neatly scheduled, but you probably didn’t schedule the following:

  • 9:15 a.m.—Kindergartener throws his pencil down, saying, “I just can’t write the letter s.”
  • 10:22—Fifth grader protests when her little brother wants to join in her science experiment.
  • 1:05—First grader covers his ears defiantly rather than listen to you explain the math problem he completed incorrectly.
  • 1:12—Third grader keeps daydreaming instead of completing her worksheet.
  • 2:47—Ninth grader complains, “Why do I have to learn algebra if I’ll never use it in real life anyway?”

Heart matters are the invisible subjects that we often sweep aside. If I’m focused on checking off the school subjects on my daily plan, I’m likely to let attitude issues frustrate me rather than seeing them as a prime opportunity to help my children mature in working through these invisible subjects in a way that honors God.

Heart Detector

When the ear-piercing smoke alarm interrupts my dinner-making, I don’t ignore it or take out its batteries—I check to see what’s burning. Similarly, an outburst from a child should prompt me to action, not merely to move on from the interruption but to address the heart matters.

Since I tend to be task-oriented, my natural reaction is to feel irritated at the disruption. If I respond to my children’s frustration by getting frustrated myself and demanding results, they will feel the hypocrisy. So I need to adjust my perspective before I can help my child adjust his or hers.

Often when I’m dealing with an attitude problem with a child, it brings to the surface heart matters of my own to acknowledge and address, such as impatience. Homeschooling means Mom is enrolling herself in the school of patience!

Heart Shepherd

How can I shepherd my child’s heart when she has gone astray into a thicket of thorns? It might take some loving and firm shepherding before she’s receptive to counsel. Once I have helped my child calm down, I can purpose to follow-up, so we can discuss character from a biblical perspective:

  • Creation: God created us to give Him glory (sorry, throwing a fit doesn’t do that).
  • Fall: The reason we fall short of glorifying God is that we are children of Adam (Romans 5:12).
  • Redemption: We can be born again as children of God through faith in His Son (John 3:3–8).

Countless other topics might be helpful, such as discussing the sovereignty of God. He is in control, allowing situations in our lives for good (even that pesky little brother), though we may not understand it at the time. Ask your child questions such as, “What do you think you can do if you begin to feel upset about this again? Are there any Bible verses that can guide you?”

Heart Keeper

Next time you’re making tea, notice that it’s the flavor of the tea—whether bitter or sweet—that seeps out of the tea bag when you add hot water. Similarly, “hot water situations” reveal what’s in our hearts. We must be depending on the Lord in prayer so we can rejoice in trials, respond wisely, grow in steadfastness, and glorify God (James 1:2–5).

While academics is important, that kind of learning will come more easily if we help our children succeed in the invisible subjects, keeping our hearts diligently.

Keep your heart with all diligence,
For out of it spring the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23)

Meal Planning to Save Your Day—and Your Budget

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meal planning menu
It’s that time of day again. The kids are starting to whine and grumble. They’re getting hungry, and it’s only a matter of time before chaos ensues. You throw open the fridge or pantry, desperately looking for something that you can cook quickly—something that even your picky eaters will like—but it seems you never have the right ingredients on hand.

What if you could spare yourself the stress of last-minute meals and make your grocery shopping process much easier? Meal planning is a way to have less stress (and more money since you’re not spending extra dollars on takeout or impulse buys at the grocery store). Here are some meal-planning tips from real moms to get you started.

• Create a monthly meal schedule

Take the advice of homeschool mom Erica and decide in advance what you and your family are going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for thirty days. Monday could be cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and fruit for lunch, and spaghetti with garlic bread for dinner. Tuesday could be pancakes for breakfast, leftover spaghetti for lunch, chicken broccoli casserole for dinner, and so on. If a month feels like too much, start by planning out the meals for just one week. Having a plan trims your grocery list to the essentials and takes the mealtime decision-making off your mind.

• Have fun with the plan

One way to make your meal plan more interesting is to create themed days or weeks. One week could feature Mexican foods; another might highlight Italian or Asian cuisine. You could also give each day of the week a theme, like Meatless Mondays, Taco Tuesdays, and so on. Ask your kids to help you brainstorm the themes for each week, or let them plan all the meals for one day every month.

• Make multiple meals at once

Set aside an afternoon or an evening to cook several meals at one time. You can make casseroles and freeze them, or double your recipe for soup or chili so you’ll have leftovers for a few nights. Make a lot of pasta and divide it into smaller containers for lunches. If you’re just cooking up some chicken or ground beef, brown an extra pound or two and freeze it; that’s time saved on another day. This tip is courtesy of Kim, busy homeschool mom and blogger at NotConsumed.com.

• Give your food budget a makeover

Every homeschool family could use a little spare change in their food budget, and meal planning can help with that. If you’re looking to do ultra-cheap meal planning, check out $5DollarDinners.com, a resource packed with inexpensive recipes that are crowd-pleasers for the whole family. Erin Chase runs the website and shares her grocery budget makeover ideas with interested moms and dads. You can even sign up for her free weekly newsletter.

• Allow yourself some takeout time  

You can still eat takeout occasionally or visit your favorite restaurant. Just be sure that you include your weekly pizza night or monthly visit to the local seafood restaurant in your meal plan. After all, you’re saving money with a meal plan; there’s nothing wrong with eating out once in a while.

Remember, modern dads and moms have plenty of kitchen help, thanks to microwaves, freezers, dishwashers, slow cookers, electric grills, vegetable steamers, and rice cookers. Use those tools to save time as you plan ahead and prepare tasty, affordable meals for your family.

• • • • •

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.

 

A Choice to Live Christmas All Year Long

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Homeschool Christmas Tree

It wasn’t too difficult of an assignment, really—to speak for fifteen minutes at a homeschool mothers’ Christmas luncheon about what it means to be a homeschool mom. Pretty straightforward, right? Yet despite my best efforts I was once again down to the wire and facing a blank page.

“Who am I to offer ‘words of wisdom’ to all these moms?” I thought. “Most of them have been homeschooling for years and have already experienced the things I’m going through right now!”

With my frustration building, I went to make sure my little ones were all tucked in for the night. I had to chuckle at their poses in bed—obviously sleep had caught up with them while they were still mid-wiggle. But as I bent down to kiss my six-year-old, she wrapped one arm around my neck and gave me a sleepy kiss. “Will you be here tomorrow morning, Mommy?” she asked.

I sometimes had morning errands to run and would be up and out before the youngest ones awoke. “Yes, Darlin,’” I said. “Lord willing, we’ll make Christmas cards tomorrow, and when Daddy gets home, we’ll put up the tree!”

Eyes still closed, she smiled. “Happy, happy, happy,” she said as I unlooped her arm and tucked it under the covers.

Reluctantly, I closed the bedroom door and went back downstairs to resume my battle with writer’s block. But as I stared at my screen, I couldn’t help but think of my little girl’s question. As much as we love our children, none of us can promise them we’ll “be there” in the morning.

Beyond God’s grace we have no guarantees that we will have another day to watch over the little lives that mean so much to us.

And so I thought, if I knew this were my last Christmas, my last few days to spend with my children and husband, what would I do differently?

  • I wouldn’t just say “I love you” but would use every way I could think of to show them.
  • The dishes could wait while I sat on the floor and read stories.
  • We would act out the Christmas story with blanket tents, and I wouldn’t care how big a mess we made.
  • Instead of just setting the trimmings out, I would make gingerbread houses with the kids and eat just as much candy as they did.
  • I would stash mistletoe around the house and catch my husband and children under it as often as I could.
  • We would go out together and make it our mission to do something nice for someone in every store we visited.
  • We would all write special thank-you cards to Daddy for everything he does for us and surprise him at work with cookies and hot chocolate.
  • We would make funny Christmas caroling videos and email them to the grandparents.
  • My snow angel would be right in the middle of all the smaller ones in the yard.
  • And when it got dark, we would turn off all the lights except the tree’s, and in one giggly, wiggly, blanketed pile, we would all make wishes on the stars that had taken up residence in our tree.

What is all this, really? What age-old wisdom would I be imparting to my children through antics like these? Will this help them get into better colleges, find satisfying careers, or achieve world peace? Not likely. But they will learn how to live. They will understand that the little things and the not so little things—like spending time with the people you love—are what really matter.

It’s so easy to let the pressures of seasonal expectations get to us. We quickly forget that our time with our beloved spouse and children is so very brief. None of us is guaranteed another Christmas, another new year, or even tomorrow.

Today is God’s gift to us, and we give a new gift to our children every day that we teach them not just how to get through life, but how to live it to God’s fullest.

So no, I couldn’t offer any great words of wisdom to the moms I would speak to, but I could offer a reminder—a reminder that living love isn’t something we do only at Christmas. As homeschool parents, our choice to homeschool our children is a choice to live Christmas all year long: loving them with our lives by teaching them how to live and love life and each other.