homeschool

3 Reasons Why You Should Teach Your Child Writing Skills

November 9, 2017 by Megan

Last week I met a homeschool mom who asked me what I thought about the importance of writing skills. Her son is getting to the end of his homeschool years, and he’s not sure if he’s going to go to college. She and her husband think that he may be well-suited for a career in engineering or technology. Does he need a course in writing skills?

You may have wondered the same thing. In this age of texting, podcasts, video chats, and instant messaging, is it still important to teach composition skills? I believe that it is. Here are three important ways our children will benefit from learning how to write well.

Writing Skills Allow Us to Reflect the Image of God

Because we were created in the image of God, we can exhibit (although imperfectly) some of the characteristics of God. God is the perfect communicator, and He chose to communicate to mankind through written communication. He gave us the Bible. When we write well—when we can organize and express ideas in a way that communicates a message to our audience—we are reflecting God’s image.

Writing Skills Develop Needed Thinking Skills

Good writing is not something that just happens. It is not a special talent that some people have and others don’t. It is a skill that is developed over time by using a process.

I’m glad that BJU Press curriculum doesn’t wait until the upper grades to develop the skill of writing; it introduces the writing process in first grade and continues to develop it through all twelve grades. Recently my first-grade daughter completed her very first composition project. She had to choose an animal, research where it lives and what it eats, and create a poster communicating that information. My third-grade daughter has completed several writing projects already—a paper describing a process and a personal letter in English, essays for heritage studies and science, and a few short projects for spelling. Both girls are gaining skills in brainstorming, organizing, and communicating ideas.

As my daughters’ writing skills develop, they will learn how to express complex, abstract ideas in writing. They will learn how to use logic to skillfully craft arguments. They will learn how to think, and most importantly, they will learn how to answer the questions of those who are seeking after salvation (1 Peter 3:15).

Writing Skills Develop Needed Social Skills

Sometimes when we think of writing, we think about the stereotypical author, holed up in a secluded place for weeks or months, feverishly cranking out the manuscript for his or her next big project. We often forget that the goal of writing is interpersonal communication. It is a social skill.

Good writing meets the needs of the reader. My third-grader’s first big writing assignment this year was a process paper. She had to write out the instructions for how to play a game. She chose to write about kickball. To be successful, she had to think about her potential audience. She had to imagine that her reader had no idea how to play kickball. She had to think about what her reader needed to play the game, and she had to organize her ideas in a way that her reader could understand.

Your child may never become a novelist, a journalist, a blogger, or a copywriter. But no matter what career your child chooses, he or she will benefit from composition skills. Find out how BJU Press curriculum can help you develop those skills through its English Writing & Grammar programs.

The Thankful Spot

November 2, 2017 by Guest Writer

Celebrating our blessings on a special day is a wonderful thing to do, but how do we teach our children to be grateful every day? How do we train them to see God’s hand in the little blessings as well as the big ones? Check out this Thanksgiving activity that offers weeks of thankfulness and fun for the whole family. It helps children develop an attitude of gratitude—and grownups may find it refreshing too!

1. Find a Thankful Spot

Remember how Winnie the Pooh had a “Thoughtful Spot”? Well, it’s time to find your family’s Thankful Spot! Is there an area of your home that everyone can view easily? Perhaps the refrigerator door, a wall near the front door, or the bathroom mirror? You could even use each bedroom door as the owner’s personal thankful spot.

2. Create Thankfulness Pages

Feel free to design your own pages, or use our handy printable “Days of Thankfulness.” You’ll need one copy for each person in your home. At the top of the “Days of Thankfulness” page, ask each child to write his or her name and the number of days till Thanksgiving.

3. Display the Pages

Now you’re ready to post the pages in your Thankful Spot. Younger children may have trouble writing on the paper while it is posted vertically on the wall, so you’ll need some way to remove the lists easily each day. Consider using painter’s tape to attach the lists to a door or wall, or use push pins to affix them to a bulletin board or cork board.

4. Add to Your Lists Daily

Remind everyone in the family to write something in one of the blank spaces on his or her list each day. For the first day, ask your kids if they can think of someone special in their lives, someone they’re thankful for. On the second day, they can write down something they like to eat. The third day, prompt them to think about a kind of technology that is useful or enjoyable. There are thirty items on the list, enough for a whole month—but you can keep the fun and thankfulness going as long as you like!

5. Set Aside Time to Be Thankful

Every day—at whatever time of day works best for your family—take a few minutes for everyone to share what (or who) you’re grateful for. Then pray together, expressing your gratitutde to God. You could do this every morning before you begin your homeschool day; or if mornings are too hectic, you could visit your Thankful Spot during lunch break, at suppertime, or in the evening before bed.

Explore Other Creative Ways to Be Thankful

There are other fun ways to stay mindful of all the great things God has given! You can make a paper tree and tape it to the wall in your homeschool classroom. Every day, have your children write some things they’re thankful for on colorful paper leaves, and tape those leaves to the tree branches.

You can also teach the letters of the alphabet and their sounds while being thankful! On the first day, ask your kids to think of something they are thankful for that begins with the letter A. Continue with a new letter each day until you reach Thanksgiving!

Even the littlest blessings are God saying “I love you” to His children. As you help your children find a new “thankful” every day, remember to seize those teachable moments to tell them more about the One who loves them best of all.

• • • • •

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.

Stopping Out: A Last Resort?

October 24, 2017 by Jenna

You know better than anyone that homeschooling solves many of the problems created in a public school or even private Christian school environment. However, it’s not always a perfect solution. Sometimes, there are issues that even homeschooling can’t solve. What happens if, no matter what solution you try, your student just wants to drop out?

He may have a reasonable argument for wanting to drop out. He may have chosen a career that doesn’t require a high school diploma. He may point out that he’s just not succeeding academically and that he’s not likely to improve. Whatever his reasons, you may feel like you’re running out of options.

There is one last resort you could turn to. An extended break from homeschooling is a viable option. The time away from the regular pressures of learning would give your student an opportunity to evaluate his life more clearly, discover God’s plan for him, and redirect his hopes and dreams to fall more in line with that plan. Once he returns to school, he’ll have a better understanding of the purpose of your homeschool and what both you and he want to achieve with it.

An extended break like this is called a stop out. Education Week published an article last year about the growing trend for students to stop out of high school. A stop out happens when a student drops out of school for more than four weeks but returns to finish later.

In the homeschool situation, it’s far easier for you to manage a stop out effectively. However, stop outs can be dangerous. The longer a student stays away from his studies, the more difficult it will be for him to recall previous learning. Besides that, older students who take a break may lose their motivation to return and finish.

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’re considering letting your child stop out from homeschool for a short time.

• Approach it with prayer

As with any major decision, you should discuss this idea with your family as well as talking to God about it. Pray about your student’s reasons for wanting to stop out. If you decide to go ahead with it, you will need God’s help more than ever in staying firm about resuming your homeschool.

• Plan a day to resume homeschooling

Breaks can be dangerous in education, especially if your student takes on a full-time job or begins pursuing other interests during the break. At some point, it will become easier to let things stay the way they are rather than returning to the way they were. Setting a day to resume homeschooling and sticking to that day will ensure it won’t be completely forgotten. Or, if the intent of the break was to remove pressure, you could set a date for a future family meeting when you will reevaluate the situation and set a firm date for resuming homeschool.

• Maintain prior learning

Perhaps the biggest danger of stop outs is the same challenge all students face over summer break. During the time away from formal learning, they tend to forget a lot of what they learned before. The study in Education Week found that students who had stopped out had a hard time getting back into the school routine. You’ll need to rely on similar methods you’ve used during summer breaks to keep your student’s mind engaged while he’s not homeschooling. You can encourage him to read new books, work through worksheets, or review old material.

If handled with caution and consideration, stopping out could be just what your student needs to get back on track for finishing homeschooling through high school. While it might not be the first solution you should consider, it’s still an option.

How have you found breaks to be helpful for your student?

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500 Years of Reformation and Education

October 17, 2017 by Ben

In our homeschool, we’ve been talking for a year now about how we’ll celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. We want our children, even at a very young age, to mark this milestone in the spread of the gospel. When Martin Luther issued his Ninety-Five Theses for debate, he probably had little idea what influence he would have on all of Western culture.

There’s so much I want my four little girls to know about the Reformation and how much God has blessed us through men He used to recover the Five Solas. We usually relate blessings from the Reformation to biblical doctrine, but there were also significant advances in education.

One area our secular society rarely acknowledges is the impact the reformers had on education. The reformers transformed the way Western civilization thinks about education—a transformation that reaches all the way to us today. And it’s a legacy that I want my little girls to know and appreciate.

Education for Bible Reading

The reformers taught that knowing the Bible was foundational to knowing God fully. And if everyone was going to know God through His Word, they needed to know how to read. So the reformers began to emphasize education. They wanted people to have the basic skills for reading so they could know their God through Scripture.

Education for All

In Germany at the time of the Reformation, education was only for the nobility, the professional classes, and the clergy. That left most of the peasantry without basic literacy instruction. There was no general expectation that every child would learn to read. But Luther and others believed that everyone should know God through Christ. That meant everyone needed to be able to read the Bible for themselves.

Although Luther didn’t come up with the idea of education for all, which is sometimes called universal education, his advocacy and influence contributed to making education for every child a priority in Western culture, so much so that some writers call him the inventor of modern education.

Education for Girls

As a father of daughters, I’m so grateful that when the reformers urged universal education they meant everyone, including women. Previously, women had been left out of education as far back as the Greeks and the Romans. The medieval church also left girls out when it came to education. But reformers such as Luther and Calvin recognized that women need to know God through His Word too. So they taught and practiced educating girls in reading and doctrine.

I want my daughters to know that, in large part, Western civilization’s emphasis on educating girls like them came from the reformers. And the reformers wanted girls to have the gift of education so they could read their Bibles.

Education by Parents

John Calvin picked up on the centrality of parents to their children’s education. Like homeschoolers today, he saw that Deuteronomy 6:7 teaches parents that it’s their duty to teach their children. He insisted that parents take responsibility for their children’s education and that religious morality should be a central aim of their learning.

We are so blessed to live in the shadow of the reformers. In one sense, my personal commitment to Christian homeschooling came from my parents. In another sense, each of us is an inheritor of a five-hundred-year-old tradition of training every child to read so that he or she can know God.

I’m not sure what celebrations my family is going to participate in for the anniversary of the reformation, but every day that you and I homeschool our children we’re paying tribute to these men’s efforts.

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Learning to Trust God for Your Harvest

October 12, 2017 by BJU Press Writer

We think of autumn as the season of harvest. Even with the conveniences of grocery stores and restaurants, we all look forward to the cooler weather that brings fresh apples, blackberries, sweet potatoes, squash, and pumpkins to the produce aisle. For all the difficulties that a life on a farm involves, it must be rewarding to gather in the harvest. Imagine finally seeing the results of all the effort you’ve put into planting and maintaining the fields for those long months!

Tending to Your Family

Don’t we sometimes think about homeschooling and parenting the same way—wishing that the family were like a garden plot so that our diligent work throughout spring and summer would yield the satisfaction of tangible results by autumn? But tending a family is a year-round occupation. Homeschooling never ends—not even when the yellow school buses make their rounds at the end of the school day. We may hand out final grades to our children as the school year closes, but rarely do we get to see a final assessment or “harvest” of our work—there’s no concrete evaluation of our overall success level.

Instead, our harvest comes in bits and pieces as our children grow. When a daughter finally understands multiplication, when a son learns to ride his bike without training wheels, when brothers and sisters help each other and unselfishly share their toys (OK, so maybe we’re still working on that one!)—these are the things that show us that the time and effort and prayer we have put into our children’s lives are bearing fruit.

The difficulty comes when not all the plants in our home garden flourish. With some of our children, we can’t help but wonder whether we will ever see a harvest ripened and ready in their lives. “Where did I go wrong?” we wonder. “Did I use the wrong seed? Overwater? Hurt the roots when trying to pull the weeds?” Sometimes we plant, tend, and do everything we can think of, but instead of the fruit of the Spirit, we see only self-centeredness, pride, and rebellion. What can we do when the seeds we’ve tried so hard to cultivate seem to lie dormant or dead in the soil—when instead of producing godly fruit, a child prefers to sow “wild oats,” heedless of the harvest they will yield?

As much as we would like it to be, Proverbs 22:6 is not an ironclad promise—a guarantee that if we hold up our end of the bargain, God will make sure our children turn out all right. Instead it is an exhortation, wisdom we will never go wrong in following. “Train up a child. . . .” Plant, plow, tend, weed, water. Do everything we can to help these plants grow and flourish. And then? Step back in prayer and watch the Lord give the increase (1 Corinthians 3:7).

Waiting for the Harvest

Of course, stepping back to watch is never easy. But the farmer can’t be constantly digging around the roots of his wheat to see whether it is growing right. He can’t pull back the husks from every ear of corn to see whether the kernals are forming properly. No, the farmer has to wait and trust that the God who grew the Garden of Eden is also watching over his fields. And we have to watch our children make decisions for themselves daily. We can and should guide, sometimes even override, those decisions while the children are young, but there comes a point when they must answer for their own actions.

Search your own heart. Are you are walking with God as He requires? That’s all you can control. Don’t carry the weight of guilt for their actions when God doesn’t ask you to bear it. We all make mistakes. We sin. He knows—He died to save us from sin. And He also chose each one of us specifically to parent our specific children. Even when hopes, goals, personalities, and tastes seem to clash horribly between parent and child, God has a good purpose in store.

One of the dictionary definitions of harvest is “a supply of anything gathered at maturity and stowed.” None of us has reached full maturity yet. Do you feel ready to stand before God today, or would you like time to grow more? The same is true of our children, whether they appear to be flourishing, yielding a bumper crop of the good things we hope to see, or they are simply alive, tenaciously clinging to the dirt. We must give them—give ourselves—time to grow.

Trusting the Lord of the Harvest

The harvest we wait for may take much longer to ripen than autumn’s golden pumpkins. It’s possible that we won’t even get to see or share in the fruit of our love-labors. But that’s all the more reason to trust the Lord of the Harvest. He knows each unrolling leaf and bud, each bug and blight, and every different season that will be a part of our children’s growth. We may sow the seeds, but it’s God who gives the rain, sun, and life. Don’t give up hope in times of drought. Don’t uproot the browning stems even when plants appear dead—you don’t know what life still flows despite the brown leaves.

Trust the Lord of the Harvest. And in your trusting, give thanks that He has the greatest stake in the harvest for which you’re both waiting. Hasn’t He even given His Son to bring it in? Give thanks that He knows the outcome and that whatever the harvest yields, God is still and always will be good. And He delights in helping His children—of every age—to flourish “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season” (Psalm 1:3).