BJU Press Blog

assessments

Homeschool Curriculum: Going Beyond the Books

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homeschool curriculum
What are all these books even for?

Have you ever caught yourself thinking that as you unpack your boxes full of homeschool curriculum for the year? Especially if you’re teaching the material yourself, there’s a lot of stuff in those boxes. Mixed in with the excitement for the coming homeschool year, you might find yourself asking, “Do I really need all this? What do these books do?”

Teacher Edition

If you really want to teach your children yourself, you need something that’s more than a glorified answer key. A good teacher edition will give you valuable resources that equip you to teach each lesson in a way that enables your children to understand the content.

You don’t have to be a subject expert to teach your children. And, as a parent, you’re probably already an expert or becoming an expert on how your children learn. What you need in your homeschool curriculum is a resource that equips you to create a learning experience that your child needs—without long, fruitless Pinterest searches.

BJU Press teacher editions offer strategies for presenting the content in ways that will bring children into the lesson. Those strategies may use hands-on learning, visual learning, discussions, or even storytelling. For example, you don’t have to go find resources for your study of light in Science 4. The Science 4 teacher edition offers additional resources for you, including directions for creating a shadow box theater or a kaleidoscope.

To get your children really thinking about what they’re reading, you need to ask questions. But what kind of questions? Which ones will get your kids really thinking about the content? Discussion questions and worldview development strands that you can choose from get your children thinking about the content. Additionally, they help them know how to think about it from a biblical worldview.

Besides teaching strategies and discussion questions, teacher editions also include lesson guides, background information, rubrics, answers, lesson plan overviews, and suggested schedules for the year. A teacher edition is truly a teaching resource.

Student Edition

The student edition or student worktext will be the most familiar piece. You might think of it as the core of your homeschool curriculum. It’s the book your children go to every day—or most days, depending on your schedule—to read lessons and complete assignments. Some textbooks may give you flashbacks to your high school days or make your homeschool feel like you’re just doing “school at home,” but a good textbook goes beyond the stereotype.

Textbook material will often be the first informational texts that your children read. Reading informational texts is an important skill for kids to develop because they will be reading and interacting with informational texts throughout their school days and as adults. When was the last time you read an instruction booklet, a news blog, or a how-to article? What about a devotional book or a sermon transcript? Even this post is an informational text. Information is all around us, and children need to learn how to read it, think about it, and respond to it appropriately. That’s why every BJU Press textbook is designed to help students as they work with informational texts.

Activities

An activities book seems kind of self-explanatory, doesn’t it? It’s a book full of activities. But what do those activities do? Many of them will be simple exercises that require just the book and a pen or pencil. Even though these activities seem simple, they give your kids a chance to review what they’ve learned so that they can develop mastery with the content. Other activities, especially in science, will be important for approaching the content in a different way. Not all children learn the same way, and your children may need to receive different kinds of information in different ways. So BJU Press activities also give your children the opportunity to draw pictures or diagrams of the content, to create models of it, to act it out, and so forth.

Assessments

Tests may be the bane of most students’ existence, but they do serve the vital function of giving you a way to evaluate whether your children are learning the skills they’re supposed to be learning. You may not plan on keeping track of all their scores, especially if you don’t have to submit grades to your state or a homeschool organization. But even if you don’t use the grades—because the numbers don’t really matter anyway—you can still use the information. Are your children showing that they can comprehend what they’re reading? Are they able to use reasoning skills as they answer questions? Can they think critically about the information? Are they drawing valid conclusions about it? Your children aren’t so much acing or failing tests as they are showing successes or weaknesses in their learning.

Do you know what all these homeschool curriculum pieces have in common? They’re all designed to do exactly the thing you want to do in your homeschool—teach. They give you manageable lessons so that you don’t have to go looking for lessons or create your own. Learn more about our textbook kits to find the perfect fit for your family!

5 Ways to See if Your Child is Learning

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Have you ever instructed your child to clean their room without checking on their work? Would you let your child bake some cookies by themselves before you observed that they’ve mastered measuring ingredients or using the oven? In the same way, we have to check on our children to make sure they’ve learned what we’re trying to teach. What we need are assessments.

An assessment is simply a way of finding out if your child learned what you set out to teach. Most of the time we think about assessments as only tests and quizzes. In reality you can assess what your child has learned in a number of ways, some of which are fun for her.

5-ways

What Kinds of Assessments?

So if we want to see if our children, particularly the young ones, have learned something and we don’t want to give them quizzes every day, how do we see what they’re learning? We can use an assessment that matches our child’s way of learning. Here are five fun ways to see if your child is learning what you’re teaching.

  1. Ask Questions

Most children know far more than they can write on the page. So ask them questions that they can respond to verbally.  You shouldn’t grade these questions. If your child reads about the life cycle of a butterfly in science, ask them what the four stages of the butterfly’s life are. If they miss the question, have them reread the appropriate paragraph. Our teacher’s editions provide great suggested questions you can use to see if your children understood what they were reading.

  1. Draw pictures

This is what I did with the 5 themes for Heritage Studies 2. I didn’t expect my daughter to memorize a definition she could write out on a test, but I wanted to see that she got the ideas. So I had her draw pictures of something from history, geography, culture, economics, and American citizenship. My daughter likes to draw, so she loved this activity.

  1. Act out an idea

If you want to see if your child understood a story they’ve read, have them act it out. If your child likes pretending, they’ll love playing the story, and you might get a chuckle yourself. In the meantime, you’ll know they understood the Reading story.

  1. Make something

When we learned about producers and consumers in Heritage Studies 2, I had my daughter create a “business” and a flyer that advertised what she could produce. She decided to make paper dogs and sell them for 10 cents each. I bought one of her paper dogs and asked “who was the producer, and who was the consumer?”

  1. Use the skill

When your children learn how to use a math concept, have them use it. So if we’ve baked 24 brownies for Bible Club and we’re expecting 18 children, I ask my daughter how many extra brownies we should expect to have. If we have 13 children, I ask if we have enough brownies to give each child two.

Can you think of other fun, hands-on ways to assess what your child’s learned?

What Is Age-Appropriate Learning?

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green bean casseroleMy go-to fall/winter side dish is green bean casserole. It’s impossible to mess up the recipe because there’s no such thing as too many fried onions or too much cream of mushroom soup. I always make green bean casserole for Thanksgiving. It’s gotten to the point that my aunt doesn’t even ask me what I’m bringing to her house for the family meal.

Should our roles ever reverse and the whole family came over to my place for the Thanksgiving feast, I think I might be in trouble. Despite the hours I spend in the kitchen happily cooking and baking, I’ve never had to roast a turkey. There’s not even a roasting pan in my kitchen.

The pleasure I find in preparing food can quickly turn into frustration or anxiety when I’m asked to prepare a dish that goes beyond my skill level. It’s the same way with your child’s academic learning. You want to challenge her potential but not frustrate or overwhelm it. What she learns should be age appropriate.

Is your child’s education the right kind of learning for her age? Your child’s learning should be guided by what is right for her age based on her cognitive, emotional, social, language, and motor skill development. There are three elements that contribute to age-appropriate learning—teaching style, book layout, and student assessment.

        1. Teaching Style—How a topic or subject is approached can make a difference in your child’s learning. A science lecture on frogs’ muscular system is not appropriate for a seven-year-old any more than playing leap frog would be for a teenager (although you might be debated with on that point!). Activities, discussions, lectures, guided questions, and manipulatives all have their place. How you teach should also be influenced by your child’s learning style.
        2. Book Layout—Illustrations are the more obvious contribution to age appropriate learning with their numbers, sizes, and styles (painting versus photograph, imaginative versus realistic, simple versus detailed) varying by grade. But the text in a book also plays an important role. Font size, color, and placement all assist in captivating your child’s attention and inviting her to learn. Compare these pages from BJU Press Reading 2 (page 45 on left) and Explorations in Literature (page 89 on right).BJU Press Reading 2 page 45 and BJU PRess Explorations in Literature page 89
        3. Student Assessment—This element may sound scary, but it’s simply an evaluation of your child’s understanding. Having your five-year-old find the triangle would be an appropriate assessment and so would asking your twelve-year-old to label triangles as acute or obtuse. Assessments can be questions, writings, or presentations. They can also be formal (like tests) or informal (like discussions). The purpose of an assessment is to find out if your child understands what you’re teaching.

How age appropriate is your child’s learning? It’s important to know whether she is overwhelmed or not challenged enough. Your child probably has strengths and weaknesses in different areas than other students her age. Here’s my challenge to you: Find good materials that increase your child’s learning appropriately. As you teach at home, customize her education by slowing down or speeding up.

You’ll be glad you did, and she probably will be too.

Assessing Yourself as a Teacher

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an end of the school year checklist for a teacher

At the beginning of the school year, you have everything mapped out—lesson plans, seating charts, and more. You start the semester knowing what you want to accomplish. Now that you’ve reached the end of the year, you might be wondering if you did everything that you meant to . . . or even if there is something that you could do better next year. The end of the school year is a great time to stop and evaluate yourself as a teacher. Here are a few things you can do to see if you need to make changes for next year.

Check Your Goals

Did you meet your goals for the year? Obviously, you have to adjust your expectations during the year depending on your class and other factors (weather, resources, etc.). But you can probably still tell if you met or came close to meeting your goals. One way to check your goals would be to evaluate your assessments. If the tests, quizzes, and homework assignments your students completed are not measuring what you need them to, they will need to be changed.

For example, it may be that a unit test about World War II assessed your students’ general knowledge about dates, locations, and people. But your objective for your students was to help them understand that the European and Pacific battles were happening simultaneously. Some of your lessons might have even focused on that objective, but your assessments didn’t assess it. By checking for situations like that you will be able to fix them and understand where you need to make improvements.

Take a Course

Are there any classes or conferences that you could attend this summer? Your school may already ask you to continue your professional development, but even if it doesn’t, you should consider looking into what’s available. A local or online university may offer education or subject-related courses that would benefit you. Or there may be a conference in your area (or near family and friends!) that would help too.

BJU Press hosts The Exchange Conference to assist classroom teachers using our curriculum. For two-and-a-half days, teachers attend sessions where they learn how to better use our curriculum when teaching certain subjects, specific grades, or with technology. To find other conference opportunities, try searching online for “teacher conferences summer 2014.” You can even narrow down the search by including your city and state so that mainly local conferences appear in your results.

Be a Student

What is it like to be a student in your classroom? You may find it helpful to remember which lessons your students were most or least engaged in as well as which activities were successful. Remembering how you connected with your students will help you plan for the future. The lessons that they loved will probably be favorites for others, and any activity that helps cement what you’re teaching is great to remember and do again. Whatever you do, don’t be afraid to try something new. Some things you will need to do every year, but at other times you may discover a great solution when you take a leap.

Have a great summer!

How do you assess yourself and grow as a teacher?

Understanding testing terms

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Every year, achievement testing season rolls around. As a child, I enjoyed testing. It meant new pencils, special snacks, and fun games. I didn’t have to worry about interpreting the test scores. Now, after studying assessments in grad school and working with people who dedicate their lives to testing, I realize how complicated the results can be. It’s hard to remember what all the terms and abbreviations mean, isn’t it?

So this month, I’ll share some testing terms and their definitions with you. I hope they help you and your children have a great testing season.

image of a door sign that says "understanding your testing results"

Norm

When a child takes a standardized test, his scores are compared to what is called the norm. Basically, the norm is the scores of a sample group of children that took the same test. They took the test before this year so that their scores are available for comparison.

National Percentile Rank

Also known as the percentile rank, this ranks your child’s scores against the norm’s scores. When your child takes a test, his scores are compared to the norm to see how he did. If he is placed in the 80 percentile then he scored as well or better than 80% of the students in the norm group.

Stanine

Stanine may be referred to as NS on your test results. It’s another grading scale that goes from 1-9. Low scores are in the 1-3 range, 4-6 indicates medium scores, and 7-9 scores are considered high. It’s a quick way to see which “group” your child scored in.

Grade Equivalent

I remember learning about grade equivalents in one of my grad classes. It’s easy to misunderstand but fascinating once you understand it.  (I misunderstood it before learning how to read it.) Basically, the GE tells you what level of student (grade level) your child scored the same as. So if your fourth-grader has a  7.2 GE on his math test, it means he scored the same as an average seventh-grade student who took the same test in his second month of seventh grade. It doesn’t mean that your fourth-grader should be in seventh grade. That would be great though! Just remember that it’s not comparing your child to his peers but correlating his score with other scores regardless of grade level.

Note: You may see PHS in the GE column. That stands for Post High School, and again it doesn’t mean that your child is ready to attend college, just that he scored higher than the average high school senior.

What other testing terms do you find confusing or hard to remember?