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Unlocking the World with Phonics

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teaching phonics with k5 beginnings

Before I learned how to read, I pretended to read books aloud. With some of my favorite picture books, I could quote the text by heart as I turned the pages. The actual process of reading was a lot harder than rote memorization—it involved forming connections, remembering patterns, applying principles, and a lot of phonics. I still remember the thrill as the pieces clicked into place, and suddenly I was reading for real.

Your child already knows how to speak English and understand it. Now, as a homeschool parent, it’s your job to teach him to read and write it well. As you prepare your child for success in reading, you have to start with what he knows—the sounds of language, or phonics.

Sights and Sounds

You may have begun teaching phonemic awareness earlier than K5. But if not, don’t worry. The BJU Press K5 Beginnings program will help your child learn to listen for specific sounds and connect those sounds with letters and letter combinations. Before long, your little one will begin to realize that the letters of the alphabet don’t just have names; they represent sounds. Combined together, those sounds can form words.

BJU Press curriculum emphasizes phonics as the basis for reading excellence, but the Beginnings program incorporates plenty of sight words as well. Learning these common, recognizable words helps kids move more quickly through a text and gives them a head start with building their vocabulary.

Exceptions and Rules

The English language is full of strange rules and odd exceptions that can be very confusing for kids who are just learning to read. If your child is struggling with remembering some of those rules and exceptions, it’s time to turn the lesson into a game.

Children love stories, so why not make phonics seem like a wonderful story filled with lovable characters? In the K5 Beginnings program, you’ll find Miss Silent E and Bossy R along with other characters who serve as guides for phonics comprehension. By lending personality and depth to these abstract concepts, the program helps children remember and apply them.

Memory Hacks

Songs are wonderful tools for remembering important facts and ideas, so the Beginnings program incorporates plenty of catchy tunes about phonics. You can use the phonics songs CD anytime to reinforce and enhance learning.

You can also hang up the provided charts displaying word-family rhymes, so your child has a clear reminder of those patterns. Word families are a major emphasis of the BJU Press phonics program, and with good reason! Knowing word families builds an excellent foundation for more accurate reading, whether the words are familiar or new.

Phonics Drills

In order for your kids to excel at phonics and reading, they must practice. The phrase “phonics drill” may not sound pleasant, but it can actually be an enjoyable experience for you and your kids. When you read sentences, your child can fill in the easy two- or three-letter words. Talk together about Mr. and Mrs. Short, who illustrate the rule that “a short vowel is always followed by a consonant or consonants.” You can look for Mr. and Mrs. Short, Miss Long, and the other phonics characters wherever you and your children are—at the grocery store, in the car, at the park, or on a walk through the neighborhood.

At first, the phonics drills will feel like a challenge; but before long, your kids will begin to realize how much of the world opens up to them when they remember their phonics word families and friends. And just like that, they’re reading.

Explore what you need to know about the K5 Beginnings program.

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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.

Stories Make a Worldview of Difference

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Homeschooling is an extraordinary experience. We have our children at home all the time. As Christian parents, we get to instill our values in them in a Deuteronomy 6:7 sort of way. In fact, that scriptural  command is why we want to give our children a Christian education. To do that we have to base everything we teach on a biblical worldview.

But what is a worldview? One online dictionary says that a worldview is a “collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group,” but that’s a little generic. Consider this definition from Merriam-Webster for English Language Learners: “The way someone thinks about the world.” Again, not very specific, especially when we’re trying to construct a solid foundation for our children’s education.

Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, uses a metaphor that I really like. He talks about worldview as a pair of glasses. This illustration resonates with me because it brings the concept of worldview from the philosophical realm into everyday experience.

Ken talks about how two equally intelligent scientists can look at the exact same evidence (say, the Grand Canyon) and come to two completely different conclusions. It’s because they’re viewing it through different lenses. One scientist looks at the Grand Canyon through biblical glasses and sees evidence of Noah’s Flood. The other looks at the Grand Canyon through uniformitarian glasses (the idea that all geological events happen in “uniform” ways) and sees evidence of millions of years. The conclusion each scientist comes to is based on his or her worldview, which determines how he or she views the evidence.

Understanding Worldview

A worldview answers several crucial questions for those who hold it, including where we came from and why we are here. A worldview defines what it means to be human. So we can distinguish one worldview from another by its answers to those questions.

However, most of us don’t think in terms of these grand questions as we go about our everyday lives. But our worldview is still there, shaping the way we see the world.

A simpler way to understand worldview is to think of it as a story—or better yet, a big story. For most people, the answers to life’s most challenging questions fit into a story. This is helpful since small children routinely use stories to interpret their world. But it’s not just for children, adults also think about the world through the lens of the stories they believe.

Telling Different Stories

Seeing worldviews as stories helps Christians understand our own worldview. The Bible is, among other things, a big story. It tells us that God created the universe but His good creation was thrown into disorder by human sin. It also tells us how God is working to redeem humankind from that sin.

Secular humanists tell a different story. They tell a tale of great human progress taking place without God’s involvement. They tell stories about how religion often stops human progress. Their heroes are people who stand up against the church. And scientists like Bill Nye look to education to “save” people apart from God.

Getting the Narrative Right

The stories told by secular humanism dominate public education. That’s why so many Christians have opted for homeschooling. When we homeschool our children, we can tell them the Bible’s true account of creation, fall, and redemption every day of the week.

But there’s a potential problem—if we use curriculum shaped by the secular humanists’ stories then those educational materials will argue for secular humanism. And we can’t change the core argument of secular education by adding devotionals on top—like icing on a cake. We have to teach from a biblical worldview perspective from the get-go.

Science, history, math, and literature must be based on the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. This true story changes the way we view everything, including education.

Think of ways the Bible’s story changes the way we view subjects such as literature and history.

Image Source: glasses, island

Teaching for Joy in Learning

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teaching for a joy of learning
Have you seen that brief animation of the learning process at a government school? I mean the one where a student, who’s sitting upright in a small, traditional desk, moves along a conveyor belt. At the student’s first stop, a robotic arms saws off the top of his cranium, revealing a light bulb. At the next stop, a robotic arm wielding a hammer smashes the lightbulb. And at the final stop, a robotic arm bestows a graduation cap. The process continues on and on with child after child moving through the “educational” process at government schools. This system was not designed for teaching children to take joy in learning.

This animation illustrates a critical fact: educational approaches have impacts on educational outcomes. So what outcome do we want for our children? We want them to think biblically about all of life. We also want them to receive the joy they can expect from their calling. In past blog posts, we’ve explored the scriptural reasons for expecting that our children can have this kind of joy. We’ve also examined reasons why our children’s experiences may be anything but joyful. While some of those reasons relate to factors inside our children, today we want to focus on the factors that we as parents and the educators of our children are responsible for. We need to create educational experiences for our children that most closely conform to how children learn.

When it comes to encouraging learning, I don’t have a comprehensive list of best teaching practices or foolproof methods. I hope to keep learning as my wife and I continue on our homeschool journey. But here are some effective approaches for teaching a joy of learning I’ve learned so far.

1. Teaching Joy with Understanding-Based Learning

Learning that focuses on understanding instead of performance cultivates joy in learning. It can be incredibly satisfying to have a child who performs off the charts on a standardized test or who can recite the Roman emperors’ names from memory. Your child might perform well on paper, but what about his or her understanding? If performance is what we’re aiming for, then we’re not concerned about children’s understanding, just their ability to memorize and regurgitate information. And what we get is children who do well on tests but can’t apply what they’ve learned. Unless they’re also focused on performance, then children who just learn for the grade get bored or frustrated.

Instead, we should be interested in comprehension. When a child understands math, it’s not only easier to learn, but the child has the tools to use math effectively. That’s why breaking out math manipulatives or engaging in other hands-on activities is so powerful. Understanding-based learning is the bridge to higher levels of learning. And Scripture reminds us that “knowledge is easy to him who understandeth” (Proverbs 14:6).

2. Sequenced Learning

Putting learning in the proper order, or sequence, prepares your child for the next step. When children have all the pieces they need for understanding at the time they need them, they’re equipped to find joy in learning. Has someone ever explained something to you, assuming that you already knew something that you didn’t know? Maybe there was important information that you’d never learned. When that happens to me, I get confused and frustrated. I want to stop.

In the kitchen, we wouldn’t ask our children to add three eggs to a mixture until we had taught them how to crack an egg. It’s often easy to approach learning by jumping around from topic to topic without a plan in mind.

With sequenced learning, our goal is to challenge our children without frustrating them. We plan each step carefully so that they have prior experiences and the knowledge they need so that they can take the next step in learning. I love it when my daughter encounters a familiar concept that has added depth and complexity to it. She’s seen it before, but it looks new to her. The new information is more challenging than what she learned before, but it is simple because of her prior experience with the topic.

3. Authentic Learning

Another way of teaching a joy in learning by focusing on the purpose for learning instead of the test. Has your child ever asked, “Will that be on the test?” It’s often an expression of frustration. Instead of taking joy in the experience of learning new things, he or she just wants to know how to pass the class. At that point, your child is probably just overwhelmed by all the extra, seemingly unnecessary information. Children also express this frustration when they ask, “When will I ever use this?”

When we teach our children, we need to regularly show them the real world application of what they’re learning. When learning is relevant to their lives, it becomes real and authentic. They can use math at the grocery story. Or they can apply what they studied in science to make a ramp to move a heavy object. Or take spelling, for example. If we give our children a list of random spelling words to recite back on their test, they’re likely going to get bored or frustrated, and they won’t remember it beyond the test. But when part of their spelling assignment is to proofread someone else’s writing, it’s authentic. They see how spelling is relevant and useful.

When children start to use their learning, they’re exercising good and wise dominion in this world. That is one of the purposes that God has given mankind. And it is the reason we educate our children.

The choices we make in teaching our children will have an incredible impact on how they view learning. If we don’t aim for comprehension, if we teach things out of order, or if we don’t give them a reason for learning, then we won’t be teaching them to have joy in learning. We’ll be crippling their joy of learning, instead. We need to choose teaching methods that support our children. Then we will be able to see the light of joy in our children’s eyes as they’re learning.

Math Automaticity: The Secret Key to Math Success

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math automaticity with M&Ms
If you’ve read any educational articles about teaching math, you may have come across the term automaticity. It may seem like a scary word, but it’s not. It simply refers to the ability to do something without thinking about it, or automatically. In math, it most often refers to the ability to use basic math facts without thinking about them. So when solving 5 + 5, you don’t have to count up the fingers on your left hand and the fingers on your right hand to make 10. You just know that 5 + 5 equals 10. Math automaticity isn’t scary at all, right?

But how do you bring your children to the point where they are demonstrating math automaticity? As with most subjects, learning math is a process. Working their way through the process guides them towards automaticity.

Start Early to Develop Number Sense

Most children begin developing number sense early—before kindergarten. The BJU Press K3, K4, and K5 materials use songs, number games, and other activities to help children develop an early sense of math. Having your children participate in board games and dice games while they’re still very young also helps them develop number sense. These early stages are crucial in your child’s development. Studies show that early math and number skills (even more than reading skills) predict how well a child will perform academically later on.

Add Manipulatives

Manipulatives play a key role in math learning by helping students to visualize throughout the process. They help solidify children’s number sense and give them tools to connect abstract math concepts to the real world and creation. That’s why all the elementary level BJU Press math courses include manipulative packets. Many of the high school level math courses even offer suggested manipulatives, like this candy sorting activity from Algebra 2.

Review and Review Again

Once your children have a strong number sense and manipulatives to work with, they will need to practice their math skills. Simply understanding a math concept and how it works doesn’t mean that they have automaticity for that math concept. They need to practice the same concepts in new situations to create familiar problem-solving paths in their minds.

For example, when I was a kid, I struggled with knowing my right from my left. But I knew that I was right handed. I also knew that the hand that makes the L was my left hand. Whenever I needed to figure out right and left, I thought about which side my dominant hand was and which side made the L. I did that so often as a child that the thought process made mental ruts. I don’t go through that whole process now because I don’t have to. That kind of repetition is what makes the review books in elementary math so important. They provide additional practice opportunities of the day’s lesson as well as a spiral review of previous lessons. Each time your children encounter a familiar problem, they’re digging those mental ruts deeper and coming to solutions faster.

Unless you’re a math person, you may be wondering why it’s important for your children to be so proficient in math that they can do it all in their heads. In fact, many parents often think of math as less important than reading. But by going through this process of developing math automaticity in your children, you’re also enabling them to go further and do more with math. And the further they go in math, the more developed their logic and critical thinking skills become. In the end, you may not be teaching the next Einstein, but you definitely want to train up children who think logically and critically when faced with difficult decisions and complicated variables.

Literary History: The Missing Links of Literature

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literary history library
Do you ever feel that, even if your child is doing well in literature, he’s not actually benefiting from it? Literature was always my best subject, but there were many aspects of literature that didn’t always connect for me. I always thought the stories were interesting enough in themselves without all the historical detail. Most discussions about literary history seemed to come from the dustiest and most disused corners of the library.

It’s easy to unintentionally let literature become an island subject. Math almost demands a constant connection to reality, and science and history don’t exist without the real world. But for readers and nonreaders alike, literature can seem like a complete subject with just the stories themselves.

But literature means much more when you understand who the author is and where he or she is coming from.

Understanding Literary History Deepens Meaning

For example, take Jack London. Though London is better known for his novels Call of the Wild and White Fang, your child will study his short story “The Law of Life” in American Literature. In “The Law of Life,” the story follows Koskoosh, an old man who accepts that it’s his time to die. He can no longer contribute to his tribe, so he passively waits for the end. His tribe always leaves the elders behind to die.

I’ve never liked London’s writing because everyone always seems to die, even the dogs. But your perspective on London’s writing changes when you approach it knowing some important history.

London worked hard his whole life, whether he was writing or working in a factory. But no matter what he did, he found little success. His best-known works are all from this period of his life. His efforts to raise himself above the station of his birth largely failed for much of his life. He finally began publishing in leading magazines in the early 1900s. London lived during the height of the progressive movement in the United States and when On the Origin of Species was gaining ground in academic communities. As a result, Darwinism and the beginnings of the American socialist movement were big influences on him.

Knowing these facts, the meaning of “The Law of Life” changes subtly. It’s not just a simple story about an old man giving in to death. Instead, it becomes a statement about how a man, as little more than an animal himself, should accept the inevitability of his death. He once was able to live and contribute, but since he is no longer able, he has no purpose. He must die.

Countering Literary Ideologies Sharpens Thinking

Literature is an ideal vehicle for teaching beliefs. In a story, the author gets to tell everything from one side, and it all makes sense. But without an understanding of literary history, a child may not always see the truth about what he’s reading. After all, from a certain point of view, London’s beliefs about life and death make sense. You should replace a tool once it’s broken or too old to work, shouldn’t you? Animals are often put to sleep once they become too old and sick, aren’t they?

Looking at literature from a historical perspective gives you an opportunity to discuss many of the beliefs that authors have poured into their writings. Once your child is able to recognize the false beliefs that contribute to an idea, he should also learn how to counter them from a correct biblical worldview. Our response to Jack London’s beliefs could be to point out that people are neither tools nor animals. God cherishes the souls of His image-bearers, no matter what they’re physically capable of.

If your child learns to make connections between authors and their backgrounds and beliefs and learns how to assess the beliefs he encounters, he’ll be better equipped to face similar issues in other media, such as movies, TV shows, and even music.