BJU Press Blog

Successful Learning

You want your children to succeed in their education. We do too. We offer practical tips for teaching your children math, science, writing, and more! These tips can be applied to any homeschool curriculum. There are also highlights of our new textbooks with examples of how our curriculum trains your children to have success in their learning.

Start here:

Mom-to-Mom: Tips for Homeschool Mompreneurs

by

tips for homeschool entreprenuers
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.

Adult Life Skills: Preparing Graduates That Think

by

preparing graduates with life skills
Have you ever lost sight of the goal in the middle of the monotony of it all? Every day seems full of diagrams, algebraic equations, dates, and classifications. You can’t help but think, “What’s the point?” That’s the question that math students have always wondered about: “When are we ever going to use this?” But Mom, you’re not immune to that way of thinking either. Sometimes you just need to take time to remember what the point is. Yes, by homeschooling your children you’re ensuring that you have the final say about everything they learn. You’re taking the opportunity to disciple them so that they can live out God’s calling in their lives. And that’s a vital part of homeschooling. But do you really need to teach them the quadratic formula? Remember, you’re not just teaching them facts. You’re teaching them critical thinking skills. In other words, you’re teaching adult life skills.

Beyond the Facts

Those skeptical math students have a valid point. The technicalities of academic subjects aren’t all that useful for adult life skills. That complicated mathematical formula won’t help your child balance a checkbook. But what those math students don’t realize is that they’re not just learning facts. As they wrestle with a new concept, they’re also learning how to learn. They’re learning how to stay focused when working through long processes. They’re learning how to solve for missing information.

In the day-to-day minutia of academic studies, the facts aren’t important. What’s important is that your children are using their minds each day and growing. They’re learning to interact with new information, consider its implications, respond to it, make connections, and create and define new information. In other words, they’re learning to think.

Critical Thinking Skills and Adult Life Skills

Much like the math students questioning why they’re learning an obscure concept, many highschoolers are noticing that they can, say, rattle off all the taxonomic ranks of biological classifications, but they can’t apply for a credit card. It will probably come as a surprise to them, but many of the things they’ll need to do in their adult lives aren’t actually that hard to do. Applications for credit cards and other loans can be so easy to do that many of us do them without thinking about the serious implications of buying on credit. But at the end of the day, that’s exactly the kind of thing you want your graduates to be able to think about.

Young adults don’t need special courses on how to pay their bills and apply for loans. Companies have a vested interest in people paying bills and applying for loans, so they make those processes self-explanatory. But young adults do need to be able to consider the implications of missing a payment or having a credit card. Is a credit card really worth it? Is building one’s credit even as important as it seems? Would it be better to always pay for things with cash on hand? These are questions that your children will have to wrestle with and answer as they grow, but they probably don’t have the maturity and life experience needed to consider them now.

Your children can use the same processes they will use as they consider the implications and wisdom of having a credit card to their own future families. Interacting with their spouses and children will involve tons of new information that they will need to learn, respond to, and determine the implications of on a daily basis.

Ready to Answer God’s Call

God has some purpose in store for your children. They may find it today or not discover it until they’re thirty. The best way for you to prepare them for whatever God has for them is to teach them how to think, learn, and grow. There’s a lot you can teach them yourself, but you can’t possibly teach them all the adult life skills they need. There’s a lot they’re going to have to learn by themselves. But if you’ve been preparing them from the beginning, and if you’ve equipped them to learn, then you have equipped them for life.

How to Develop Critical Thinking Skills in Young Children

by

Developing critical thinking skills in young learners
Critical thinking skills are essential for success in today’s society. But they’re not something you can cram into your child’s head right before they graduate. The ability to thinking critically has to be developed. And developing it takes a lot of time.

What exactly is critical thinking? Critical thinking, sometimes called higher order thinking skills, or HOTS, includes the ability to make applications, analyze, evaluate, create, and synthesize information. Critical thinkers don’t just know information; they know how to use it. They can solve problems and think for themselves.

So if the development of critical thinking skills is such a crucial part of any homeschool, how can you as a homeschool mom start developing these skills in your young children?

Encourage Imaginative Play

First of all, you can give your young children plenty of unstructured play time. Play is an important part of childhood—it is truly the “work” of children. When kids play, they have opportunities to “try out” different roles and activities. I see this a lot in my home—my youngest daughter is just starting to enjoy pretend play. Last night she pretended to be a restaurant worker, and I was the customer. Her little two-year-old mind had to work through what she needed to fill my order. I ordered tea and salad, but  for me to enjoy my “meal,” she needed to bring me a cup, a plate, a pile of pretend lettuce, and a fork.

When my older daughters play, their fantasies are a lot more complex. Sometimes they’re early American settlers trying to survive in the wilderness. Sometimes they’re managing orphanages or teaching in schools. But they’re always solving problems, applying the things that they know to different scenarios and exercising their brains. They aren’t wasting time.

Ask Questions to Encourage Critical Thinking Skills

• Ask a lot of questions.

Another important way you can develop critical thinking skills in your young children is by asking them lots of questions—and not just yes-no questions. Ask them open-ended questions that require  thoughtful answers. The BJU Press reading curriculum is full of this type of questioning. You can read about how these questions help build interest and develop critical thinking skills in my  article “Make Reading Lessons Interesting with Questions.”

You can use this type of question in everyday conversation too. For example, my oldest daughter is a voracious reader. One evening during dinner, my husband asked her about one of the books she had just finished reading. She immediately began to summarize the plot. But my husband was more interested in the moral tone of the book, so he began asking her questions such as “Why is that character considered good? Did that character do the right thing? How do you know?” Questions like these help her to analyze and evaluate the things that she reads.

• Get them to make predictions.

Second, ask your kids questions to help them make predictions. When my kindergartner learned about dentists and dental health, we decided to do an experiment that was suggested in the BJU Press Focus on Fives teacher edition (vol. 1). I hard-boiled three eggs and soaked them in a dark-colored cola to show what sugary drinks do to your teeth. Before I placed the eggs in the cola, I asked my daughter “What do you think is going to happen to these eggs? Do you think the cola is going to be good for them?” Questions like these will help her develop cause-and-effect reasoning abilities that are necessary for making applications.

• Ask them to compare and contrast.

Finally, ask your kids to compare and contrast things. This past week, I taught my kindergartner about the letter e. She was having difficulty writing the uppercase E and kept writing the numeral 3. So I started asking her questions: “How does an E look like a 3? What’s different about it?” This comparing and contrasting exercise helped her distinguish between the two because it helped her analyze the parts of each one.

Allow Your Kids to Fail (and Help Them Learn from It)

Our kids will never learn to think for themselves if we do all their thinking for them. So give them permission to try new things, and be prepared to let them fail. When I was about eleven, my mother was so sick one night that she let my brother and me make dinner without her supervision. We ruined thirteen potatoes that night learning how not to cook a potato. But we did eventually figure out a way to cook them to everyone’s satisfaction. Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something is to experience what doesn’t work.

Additional Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about the importance of critical thinking and how BJU Press homeschool materials develop critical thinking skills, check out the following articles.

Teaching and Assessing Reading Skills

by

teaching and assessing reading skills
The whole purpose of the BJU Press phonics system is to give your child the reading skills he needs to understand information and communicate well in life.

In these videos, Mrs. Walker explains the different parts of our system, the value of our emphasis on vocabulary, and the best way to give your student a clear and helpful grade. You’ll find a summary of each video along with a link to the video on YouTube embedded in this blog post. We trust the videos will be valuable as you help your student gather and present information from his reading.

BJU Press Phonics in Reading

Our phonics system involves four major components that will help your child become a better reader. First, we help your child recognize certain sounds. We help him learn the basic sounds of the alphabet and recognize what each letter sounds like. Second, we combine different letters and present what those combinations look and sound like. Once he knows these sounds, he can begin grouping them into words.

Third, we help him build a vocabulary of sounds and sound-combinations so that he can read new words easily. And finally, we take careful steps to encourage comprehension at every level of reading. We want to help your child to understand the material he’s reading, not just repeat sounds. Our phonics curriculum is an enjoyable and thorough way to help your student become the best reader that he can be.

Vocabulary Versus Service Words

In our lessons, your child will encounter both vocabulary and service words. Vocabulary words are words that may be unique to a story but necessary for your student to fully grasp what the story is saying. We place them in a normal context to make them easier for your child to understand.

Service words, on the other hand, are words that your student is more likely to hear on a daily basis, so we will drill these a little more to help your student incorporate them into his vocabulary. Growing and developing your child’s vocabulary will help him be clearer in his word choices and communicate more effectively.

What Do I Include in a Reading Grade?

It’s completely normal for homeschool parents to struggle with grading their child’s reading abilities. Since you can’t see what your student thinks before he says the words, how can you measure how well he is reading?

First, always remember that the two types of reading have different objectives. Comprehension is the goal of silent reading. How well does your student understand what he reads? Has he gathered all of the meaning that the author wanted to convey? In contrast, communication is the goal of oral reading. Can your child read a piece out loud smoothly without any mistakes? Can he read with appropriate inflection and expressions?

To help you grade both types, we’ve included rubrics and written work to evaluate how well your student is comprehending what he is reading. These items include many questions to clearly show you how much information your child is processing as he reads.

To calculate a final grade, we have provided a prioritized list of the important reading skills to help you give an appropriate grade and help your student progress. Once you’ve finalized the grade, be sure to carefully walk your student through the different parts of the composite grade. Reward the areas where he succeeds, and clearly show him the areas where he needs to grow. Giving your child an accurate measurement of his reading skills will help clarify his reading strengths and address his opportunities for growth.

We hope these videos will help you understand our intentions behind our phonics program and help you accurately track your student’s reading progress. To access more information about the Reading 2 program, view the full playlist of videos on YouTube, or visit our website.

• • • • •

Matt recently graduated with an MA in communication studies and currently works as a freelance writer. He attributes the wild variety in his current opportunities to the exploration his parents gave him through the homeschooling experience. He enjoys theater, the gym, and choral music and will rarely say no to a cold glass of sweet tea.

Homeschool Resources: What Are They For?

by

homeschool resources - visual and manipulative packets
Manipulatives and visuals, oh my! If you weren’t sure what all those books are for, then chances are you’re also not sure about all these extra homeschool resources, either. Do you really need them? Are they worth it?

Let’s take a look at some of the homeschool resources you might need on your homeschool journey.

Manipulatives

Manipulatives are perhaps the most essential “extra” resource you can get. They’re incredibly important for young learners. Manipulatives give students a way to physically experience a concept that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see, touch, or interact with. They give children an opportunity to experience a concept with all their senses. In other words, they’re using multisensory learning. For instance, how do you teach a child that one and one makes two? Most of us might take one pen, then get another pen, and then count again to find that we have two pens. Those pens become manipulatives that give meaning to the numbers. In math, manipulatives are a key components for helping children develop number sense.

Manipulative packets are specifically designed to match the scope of concepts taught in a particular course. They make life easier for you because, when you get to a new concept, you already have the manipulatives on hand and you don’t have to find things to use. BJU Press offers manipulative packets for math from K5 through Grade 6. Manipulatives also apply to other subjects, but on a much smaller scale than math. Cutouts and suggested items to use as manipulatives are available in the teacher editions and activity manuals rather than being available for separate purchase.

The most important thing is having manipulatives and using them regularly. That said, can’t you just use any old thing in place of the items in a manipulative packet? You could, but it will get harder and harder to find objects to use as manipulatives. What will you use for groups of hundreds, fractions, or unusual shapes? You may be able to save a little bit of money by not buying the packets, but you might lose what it was worth in time and effort.

Visuals

Visuals may seem self-explanatory, right? They’re things for your students to look at as they learn. It’s another aspect of multisensory learning—learning by sight. But a visuals packet isn’t just a bunch of pictures that explain a Bible lesson or illustrations for a reading lesson. They’re packets of charts, graphs, and other visuals that help students interact with concepts in a different way.

For example, BJU Press’s Phonics and English 1 includes visuals for the phonics characters—the Shorts, the Longs, and others. The visuals packet introduces the student to the character and what the character represents. Then as they go through their workbooks, they’ll see those characters again to remind them about the different phonetic rules. Children often find it easier to remember stories than lists of rules. The visual characters weave together a story for them to use as they’re learning phonics. Other visuals might give a plot diagram for a story, a chart for creating paragraphs, and so on.

Most visual packets come with a subject kit automatically, but do you really need them? You’ll have to decide based on what you know about how your child learns. But remember: children don’t always learn just one way, and sometimes they learn different concepts in different ways. You might need visuals for one lesson but not the next. It’s important to have them available even if you don’t always need them.

Unlike the books, these homeschool resources aren’t typically core materials that you’ll need every day. And not every curriculum provider offers them. Whether or not you should purchase them depends on what you need to do to teach a concept effectively. And that’s a question only you can answer.