language arts

Education in the New World

November 17, 2015 by Ben

I remember my parents being criticized by many family members for taking us out of the public schools. But just like thousands of other Christian families today, my parents didn’t want their kids influenced by the agenda of modern society. Today’s exodus of Christian families from the secular public schools is reminiscent of another pilgrimage.

When the Pilgrims came to America, they left Europe so that they could be the primary influence on their own children. It was a difficult first year, but the Lord provided. As they offered up thanksgiving, other deeply committed Christians who wanted the same opportunity for their children started pilgrimages to North America. Soon other communities popped up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the intent of establishing “a city on a hill.” These parents wanted to be governed by God’s law and to train their children to live the same way. It was their desire that future townships could be shining examples of communities committed to serving God.

Committed to Education

These Puritan parents and leaders were committed to godly learning. They believed that reading was critical to knowing God through His Word and to following the laws of their townships. So parents took the time to teach their children how to read in spite of the difficulties of frontier life.

However, the commitment to education began to diminish within twenty-five years. Parents were beginning to be negligent in teaching their children reading and Christian doctrine. So in 1642, the Puritan leaders in the Massachusetts Bay Colony gathered to establish a law requiring that parents teach their children to read and “that all masters of families do once a week (at the least) catechize their children . . . in the grounds & principles of Religion.” [text of Massachusetts Act of 1642]

More Challenges

Five years later, the Puritan leaders gathered again and outlined a plan to provide assistance to parents for the education of their children. They believed that “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, [was] to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures” by preventing children from learning to read. [text of Massachusetts 1647 “Old Deluder, Satan” Act]

So the Puritans provided a teacher for every township with fifty families to help them in teaching their children to read and write. If the township had a hundred families, they made provision for constructing a school building. Parents made a nominal contribution to pay the salaries of the teachers, but they were still responsible for their children’s education. All of this learning was motivated by a desire that children know the Lord through reading His Word.

Startling Changes

Imagine what the Puritans would think if they walked through the halls of today’s schools. How would they respond to the discovery that education has been ripped from its intended purpose—service to God? I think the Puritans would do what many Christian parents are doing today and take their children away from the evil influences. After all, they were willing to take their families into the wilderness of Massachusetts to give their children a thoroughly Christian education.

But even after that arduous journey, Puritan parents still faced challenges in providing education for their children. Yet they were willing to make the sacrifices they believed were necessary to ensure their children received that biblical education.

Providing our children with Bible-based education is vital, and BJU Press supports families like yours and mine in making this kind of commitment to Christian education by creating textbooks that present every academic subject and every aspect of life through the lens of what God has to say about it.

Are you ready to make the commitment?

Remember These Dates in November

October 29, 2015 by Meredith

November has a heritage of blessings! There are many things to celebrate. It must be the start of the holiday season! I hope you and your family take time to reflect on God’s blessings this year (James 1:17). To start us off, here are two month-long observances worth mentioning.

Native American Heritage Month

Remember this month’s observance by highlighting the notable Native Americans mentioned throughout this post. You can also find more teaching resources from the National Archives.

NaNoWriMo

What’s the most words you’ve ever written? Try cranking out fifty thousand words this month, just for fun. Yes, fun! This special challenge does my literary-loving heart some good, although I must confess writing that many words (and having them all intelligible) seems overwhelming. Start small and find ways to incorporate National Novel Writing Month into your kids’ learning with ideas from Write a Novel in a Month.

November 4

The discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb occurred on this date in 1922. It wasn’t until about a month later that the archeologists were able to open the tomb and discover what treasures the Egyptians had placed with his mummy. View these images of the earthly wealth that surrounded King Tut, and take an opportunity to discuss how as Christians, we can lay up treasure in heaven (Matthew 6:19–21).

November 7

Marie Curie was born on this date in 1867. She taught physics at the Sorbonne in France but is probably most famous for her work with radioactivity. It was through this research that Marie and her husband discovered two elements (polonium and radium). Marie also won a Nobel Prize in chemistry and another in physics for her work. This chart of the Periodic Table inspires me to remember all the elements! Can you find curium, named for Marie and Pierre Curie?

November 11

Veteran’s Day honors all the men and women who dedicate their lives to serving in the American armed forces. While this federal holiday started as a remembrance for those who served in World War I, it now serves as a day to show tribute for all service men and women from every American war.

In particular, there’s a small, but significant group who helped to defend our nation at a critical time in history. Known as the Navajo “Code Talkers,” this group of Native Americans worked with the US military during World War II. This communication system is the only unbroken code in military history. The code itself was so complex that even native Navajo speakers would not be able to make sense of the cryptic messages. Because of the classified nature of this code, these veterans were not recognized for their efforts until decades after the war ended. Watch these Navajo Code Talker interviews.

November 17

On this day in 1805, Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific Ocean. Their journey took about two years—now we can travel across the continent in just hours! The purpose of their exploration was to chart the land west of the Mississippi River contained in the Louisiana Purchase. Lewis and Clark took notes on plant and animal life, geography, and Native American tribes. Their journey started in Missouri, and they went all the way up to Oregon (where they saw the Pacific Ocean) and back again.

The success of their expedition depended in part on a Native American woman named Sacagawea. She helped the corps with her insights into Native American culture. Sacagawea’s best- known contribution to the exploration came when her own tribe, the Shoshone, agreed to provide horses to carry the corps. Checkout this interactive lesson about the expedition!

November 20

On this day, the three-position traffic light was patented in 1923 by Garrett Morgan. Since previous traffic lights offered no warning between go and stop, this invention helped to decrease the number of auto accidents. Remember to drive safely especially if your kids are soon-to-be backseat drivers! I think a game of red light, green light would be great to include for today’s family activity. Don’t forget to add the yellow light (walking) too!

November 21

The Separatists completed the signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620. This document listed the rules the colonists agreed to live by as their ship landed in “new” territory outside of the land granted to them by the English government. Read the text of the Mayflower Compact. Does your family have a similar “code of conduct” that your kids can relate to?

November 26

In the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday in November. We often think back to the first Thanksgiving shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags. Many details about this event may be mythical, but we do know that the Pilgrims took a day to celebrate God’s goodness.

One of the blessings God gave to the Pilgrims was a friend named Squanto (Tisquantum). His ability to speak English gave Squanto opportunities to help the Pilgrims as they established their colony in the New World. He taught them how to live off the land and served as a negotiator between them and the surrounding Wampanoag tribe. Squanto’s efforts allowed peace to exist between the two groups for almost fifty years. Find ways to celebrate this special holiday by being a blessing to others and spending time with family. You’ll also want to be on the lookout for a Thanksgiving-themed roundup post I’ll be sharing in a couple weeks.

Learning the Value of Grammar Lessons

October 6, 2015 by Megan

Many high schoolers question the usefulness of studying grammar. I know I did.

My parents started homeschooling when I was in seventh grade. I was a good student and had stayed on the honor roll throughout elementary school. I loved learning and generally spent my spare time either reading or typing out stories on my family’s computer. I enjoyed my distance-learning history and literature classes enough that I often watched the videos twice. But I loathed the English class in the distance-learning program that my parents chose.

During that class, I rarely paid attention, choosing instead to either doodle in the back of my notebook, write stories, or get a head start on the evening’s homework assignment.

I had several reasons for disliking English. Minor reasons included the fact that the teacher on the videos was annoying, the textbook was visually uninteresting, and I never felt like I learned anything new. But the main reason that I hated the class was that the content seemed useless. The distance-learning program that we used (not BJU Press) was effective at drilling the course content into my head, but it failed to answer my burning question of why the content should be learned in the first place.

It wasn’t until a few years later when I took a missions trip to Micronesia that I began to understand the usefulness of grammar. That summer, I traveled with some friends and spent almost a month on Majuro, the main island of the Marshall Islands with my aunt, uncle, and cousins, who were missionaries there. During our stay, my uncle gave us daily lessons in Marshallese. I had expected to learn a collection of useful Marshallese phrases such as “How are you?” “How much does it cost?” and “Where is the restroom?” Instead, we talked about things like pronouns and verb tenses and where to place adjectives in relation to nouns. All those grammar exercises in English class were finally coming in handy! I was so thankful that I knew the “lingo” of language. I knew what adjectives and pronouns were, and I knew the role they played in sentence structure. That knowledge helped me immensely, and I was able to learn quite a bit of Marshallese during that brief time.

Three years later, I was a sophomore in college taking an expository writing class and learning another use for all those grammar exercises. That semester, my professor used a lot of terms like gerunds, participles, and nominative absolutes as he tried to challenge us to experiment with sentence structure to create compelling prose. Again, I was thankful for those years of studying grammar. I knew the terms as well as the concepts, and that knowledge was helping me become a better writer.

Seeing grammar at work in the real world got me excited. I was beginning to see grammar not as a tool for torturing students but as an essential part of producing clear, God-honoring communication. I realized students needed to be taught grammar through this worldview lens. And I decided that I wanted to teach them. This former English-class-hater actually ended up pursuing a master’s degree in English education.

In the providence of God, I’m not currently teaching grammar in a classroom. I’m a stay-at-home mom with three daughters. But someday soon I will begin teaching them the fundamentals of English grammar. And from the very beginning, they will know its value.

Help for Moms with Struggling Young Readers

September 8, 2015 by Megan

In July, I wrote a post about how to know when your child is ready to start kindergarten. But what if you’ve already started, and your child is having trouble? Let me tell you about my friend (whom I’ll refer to as Amanda) when her youngest son (Joel) was struggling with learning to read. Here’s how they found success.

Amanda had no worries about Joel starting kindergarten. He was four and a half, four months older than his older brother (William) had been when he had started. William had learned to read in K5 and had breezed through his early elementary years in a Christian school, exceeding both his parents’ and his teachers’ expectations. Although circumstances had changed and Amanda was now homeschooling, she didn’t expect Joel’s experience to be much different.

“I assumed that we would never have a problem,” Amanda told me. After all, Amanda was a former third-grade teacher. She was confident in her teaching ability. She was also confident in her curriculum choice—BJU Press—which “laid everything out for me. I knew exactly what to do.”

Joel completed K4 and K5. He would often answer his brother’s third-grade math problems. But at the end of K5, Joel still wasn’t reading.

“I didn’t think that much about it,” Amanda admits. “BJU Press does not expect mastery of every concept at the kindergarten level, so I just thought that he would pick it up in first grade. I figured that he just needed more time.”

But they got into first grade, and Amanda found herself spending all morning with just the reading aspect of the curriculum. And Joel wasn’t getting it.

“I remember sitting at the dinner table one night. My husband asked Joel what he had learned in school that day. Joel didn’t remember. I said, ‘The letter T.’ My husband asked Joel what sound T made. Joel made several attempts at an answer, but none of them were right. We had spent all morning on this concept. And he still wasn’t getting it. I realized at that point that we were in trouble.”

“It was the most frustrating experience for both of us,” Amanda relates. “I was frustrated. Joel was frustrated. And I started thinking, ‘What do I do? Should I repeat him? Should I pull him back to kindergarten?’”

She sought the advice of a friend that taught K5 at a Christian school. Her friend advised her to just keep on going. She told Amanda that for a lot of boys, reading “clicks” the second half of first grade. Another friend of Amanda’s with a lot of teaching experience seconded that advice. “You’re homeschooling,” she reminded Amanda. “You can do whatever you want. Make accommodations. Think outside the box and try teaching it another way.”

Amanda went to the craft store and bought decorative letters, punched them out, and let Joel paint them. She went to the hardware store and bought sandpaper and had Joel trace letters on it. “We did a lot of hands-on,” Amanda tells me. “Nothing by itself seemed to be making a difference, but we kept doing it.”

They kept plugging away, and then in the spring, something happened. Joel started reading.

“It finally just all came together for him,” Amanda remembers with a smile. “He wasn’t a great reader by the end of first grade, but he was reading. And he’s done fine ever since.”

Joel is indeed doing well. He’s entering his senior year in high school and is looking toward the future. He wants to attend college next year to study criminal justice and history. Amanda is obviously proud of the young man he has become. “Those days that we struggled were horrible—I wouldn’t want to repeat them. But I’m glad we didn’t pull Joel back into kindergarten or have him repeat first grade,” she tells me. “Intensely focusing on phonics instruction was the right thing to do even though it took a lot of time and energy. Joel ended up succeeding. And since we were homeschooling, his success was my success too.”

How We Build a Solid Foundation in Our Elementary English

September 3, 2015 by Meredith

building bricks — Building Bricks by Hannes Grobe/Wikimedia Commons/CC 3.0

Children love building tall towers. Their goals can be quite lofty (literally) and sometimes others are enlisted to complete the project. At some point, the simple tower always seems to come crashing down. For an unsuspecting child, his response to the fallen tower is often tears or outbursts of frustration. But a “demolished” tower made from building blocks can easily be rebuilt.

When it comes to your children’s education, the process of building their tower of success is more intricate and complex. It requires establishing a solid foundation before adding more levels of learning. Their future is at stake, and that’s not something to play around with.

One subject that affects your children’s educational success “tower” is their mastery of the English language. It plays a key role in preparing them to communicate clearly through their academic papers and projects now as well as for their meeting presentations in the future.

Did you know that all our BJU Press elementary English textbooks have been written with those goals in mind? Each textbook presents the parts of speech in a similar chapter order and includes alternating chapters on writing to provide immediate application. Every grade level also adds a more detailed explanation so that your children understand foundational concepts before their knowledge is increased.

Sentences are defined as expressing complete thoughts in English 2. This concept is then used to help students identify and properly use the parts of speech. By the time your child enters sixth grade, his grasp of the English language should allow him to form compound and complex sentences.
Nouns may be the easiest part of speech to understand in comparison to the others largely because they relate to what children are already familiar with—people, places, and things.
Verbs come next. They add another layer of understanding by showing action. Other types of verbs such as helping and linking also receive special attention in a separate chapter.
Pronouns are gradually introduced in English 2 to make sure students can distinguish between a noun and a pronoun. English 3 through English 6 include a separate chapter just for this part of speech.
Adjectives are explained in English 2 by relating them to the five senses—how things look, smell, sound, taste, and feel. Specific types of adjectives are included in later grades.
Adverbs come in English 3 where they are compared with adjectives. This pairing of the two parts of speech continues all the way through English 6.
Conjunctions appear in English 3. The role of this part of speech is outlined more thoroughly as your child learns to write compound sentences.
Prepositions are first presented in English 4 after the nouns and pronouns are clearly defined. They are connected with learning about phrases.

Children try to build their towers so that they reach the ceiling, and all of us at BJU Press want your childen to reach their full potential when it comes to using the English language.

Check out the “Look Inside the Book” feature for our elementary English products.