BJU Press Blog

4 Ways to Complete Hymn Studies

by

Hymn Studies

Have you ever thought about the origins of the hymns you sing? In addition to being songs of devotion and worship, hymns are works of literature. You can study their mechanics, structure, and artistic form just like you’d study any other poem. When doing hymn studies, you often will gain a deep blessing by the end of the hymn study. Explore four important ways that you and your kids can dive into the origins and design of familiar hymns.

Hymn Studies for the Writer’s Backstory

We don’t know the story behind every hymn, but thanks to the internet and other resources, you can usually find some facts about the writer and the events surrounding the hymn text’s creation. The stories of John Newton, Fanny Crosby, William Cowper, Frances Ridley Havergal, Charles Wesley, and others reveal the writers not as paragons of biblical virtue, but as real people whose struggles and tragedies drew them closer to God. You’ll find yourself inspired and encouraged by their stories, and no doubt your children will be fascinated as well! As you plan your hymn study schedule, consider including the stories and texts of more recent hymn writers, not just those from the Golden Age of Hymns.

The Historical Context

Context is important, whether you’re studying the Bible itself or other forms of literature and art. As you move through your hymn studies, explain to your children how people spoke during the time when the hymn was written. Perhaps they used more formal language, or pronounced certain words differently than we do today. Occasionally, with older hymns, you may encounter a word with a totally different modern meaning, and your hymn study can cover both definitions. Ask your children how and why they think that definition or pronunciation may have changed over time.

The Artistic Value

Depending on the age of your kids, you can keep this part simple or take a more literary approach. For younger kids, ask them to identify rhyming words at the ends of hymn lines. Your middle graders can point out the rhyme scheme, such as abab or abba; older kids can identify the hymn’s poetic structure (such as iambic vs. trochaic) and count the metric feet.

Ask your children to point out instances of alliteration or internal rhyme, and suggest that they circle words in the hymn that seem especially beautiful or poignant to them.

Hymn Studies for the Spiritual Benefit

One of the most rewarding parts of studying hymns is unwrapping the spiritual truths they contain. Your hymn study takes you through the process of appreciating the writer, the historical context, and the literary value, but ultimately the greatest blessing comes from the revelation of God’s timeless truth. To close your hymn study, have your kids each write down one special biblical truth they learned from exploring the hymn.

• • • • •

Rebecca is a work-at-home freelance writer, novelist, wife, and 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.

Levels of Biblical Integration in Homeschool Curriculum

by

Levels of Biblical Integration

As a homeschool parent, you want your children to grow in discerning between good and evil. As you evaluate your curriculum for the year, it’s important to consider not just your children’s learning styles and preferences but also how their curriculum is shaping their worldview. Biblical integration within the curriculum is an integral part to developing a Christian worldview.

With so many secular voices in education, how can you determine the quality of the Christian education you’re giving your children? We’ve created a scale to help you evaluate the quality of biblical worldview integration in your curriculum. You should be able to use your curriculum to capture your children’s minds and hearts with a love for God and His Word.

Level 0 – No Biblical Integration

Level 0 does not mean that there is no mention of the Bible. Rather, there is no connection between the Bible and the lesson materials. Curriculum at this level include Bible reading and prayer separate from the lesson, and so claim to give your children a Christian education. Since a biblical worldview has no influence on the lesson itself, it’s not really a Christian education.

Level 1 – Referencing the Bible

In this level, the Bible may be present in the lessons, but it doesn’t change or reshape learning. It primarily just reminds children that the Bible is there. It doesn’t help children to think more deeply about biblical principles or to consider how they can live out the Bible today.

1a – Biblical Analogies

Curriculums at this level look for areas where a biblical concept and a subject overlap. This desire for overlap creates analogies like a butterfly’s metamorphosis to illustrate a believer’s sanctification. Another example is using a plus sign to represent the cross because Jesus’ righteousness is added to our account. These analogies have no inherent connection to the materials. With only Bible analogies, children will never understand how Scripture is relevant to everyday life.

1b – Biblical Examples

Level 1b looks for instances of various subjects in the Bible. A curriculum might ask students to look for evidence of pi in the building of the temple during math class. They might even use the story of Joseph and Judah to study dramatic irony. Using this sublevel shows how the Bible is relevant in various areas of study. However, if a curriculum never goes deeper than this level, the Bible has not yet influenced your children’s real-world learning.

Level 2 – Responding with the Bible

This level involves using Scripture to shape the way your children interact with and study the world. The Bible becomes essential in their critical-thinking skills. Children will need to apply what they know about the Bible to their studies and their everyday choices.

2a – Serving with the Discipline

God issued a command in Genesis 1:28 to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” He also commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves in Matthew 22:39. Curriculums at level 2a show children how to follow these commands in each subject. Dominion Modeling segments in BJU Press math materials open doors for you to discuss how to live out God’s Creation Mandate. For example, in chapter 4 of our Algebra 1 textbook, these questions will prepare your children to be good stewards of money by teaching them to understand interest rates. To serve others, your children might also learn how to apply linear functions to build a wheelchair access ramp.

2b – Worshiping with the Discipline

This level turns learning opportunities into worship opportunities. You might implement worship during schoolwork time by having your children write poems praising God. They could follow the example of the authors of the Psalms, or practice a poetry form they learned recently. Teaching that God is creator of everything allows us to see His handiwork in every field of study. Once we can recognize His work, we must point the glory back to Him.

Level 3 – Rebuilding with the Bible

Level 3 is the deepest level of biblical integration. In this level, the Bible becomes the standard for how your children will study and understand every subject. Taking a secular curriculum and making it Christian by pointing out the errors can never be a level 3 biblically integrated curriculum. A secular curriculum begins with the premise that God and Scripture must be absent from education. In order to have a level 3 curriculum, the materials must be built on the premise that God is the ultimate standard for education. Materials designed with this level in mind help alleviate the burden on you to constantly help your children separate the lies from the truth while they are learning.

3a – Evaluating the Premises

A curriculum incorporating level 3a compares the content of each subject to the standard of the Bible. This process helps your children to question what is accepted as truth in secular thinking. For example, the Bible challenges the assumption that math is completely objective and certain. In science, the Bible also challenges modern scientists’ assumptions of uniformitarianism. When the Bible becomes the standard of the curriculum, your children will learn to reject the modern premise that humans are the ultimate standard for truth.

3b – Rebuilding the Discipline

The most important step of biblical integration is starting with the Bible as the foundation for learning. For example, by making the Bible the foundation, we can affirm the historicity of Genesis 1-11 as the beginning of our world and human culture. We then can build on the philosophical basis of Genesis as we study history and science. Because we begin with the truth about Creation, Fall, Redemption, we can place each subject your children study in its proper sphere, neither unduly elevating or neglecting them.

Many people in our culture want to downplay the relevance of Scripture in every sphere of life. They believe that religion is okay as long as it stays at home and at church on Sundays. At BJU Press we design our materials to show your children that the Bible is the foundation for all of life, from family devotions to playtime. Each product we produce is built from the premise of the truth of God’s Word in order to help you shape your children’s minds with a biblical worldview.

Labs That Get the Right Results

by

get the right results from your labs
What do I smell? What was that noise? Why is the water so cold? Can we build a tall, tall tower? My toddler is full of questions about her world. You probably remember those days. So many questions! When we think about all these questions, science naturally comes to mind. But science is not about knowing the right answers. It’s about finding ways to answer the right questions. Children are naturally curious. One of the reasons you might homeschool is to focus attention on what your children find interesting. What better way to get hands-on experience answering questions than with labs?

It may be tempting to let your kids read about lab experiments. You may think that watching a video will teach them the answers just as well. But there are three main benefits to doing the labs.

1. We learn better by doing.

To learn any new skill, you have to try it yourself. Lab exercises in science class are not just teaching your children answers for a test. Labs are about building new skills. When I was a biology student, I didn’t particularly enjoy dissections. Why do I need to cut open a preserved animal to learn where all its parts are? I remember sitting in Human Anatomy and Physiology lab in college. We were dissecting cats. On this day we were trying to find blood vessels. I was stuck on one site where a branching vessel should be. It just wasn’t there. I finally sought help. My professor cut a little further down and found the branch. He was so excited that he called over every student in the lab to see it. I was learning how to think about three dimensional objects, or spatial reasoning. But I was also learning that not every specimen follows the rules. Imagine how useful that experience would be to a future surgeon. Spatial reasoning is also critical for engineers, athletes, artists, and more.

2. With labs, we learn to ask the right questions.

During my dissection, I was asking “Why isn’t the branch point where it’s supposed to be?” If I had asked, “Where is it?” I would likely have kept looking until I found it. When doing a lab exercise, your child may get stuck. Encourage her to ask a different question. Over time, and with experience, she will get better at asking the right questions. Questions are the inspiration of science. You can’t have a hypothesis without first having a question. If it’s a good one, it will motivate the pursuit of answers. When you use a lab manual, encourage your child to ask at least one question beyond the manual. Then see if you can find an answer together. A child pursuing his own question will retain more knowledge.

3. We learn to think critically about results of our labs.

The goal of a lab exercise should not merely be getting to the answer. If that were the goal, watching a video would be just as useful. It’s about the process leading up to the result. I recently saw an article on social media about a handwashing experiment. The headline said it was “just in time for flu season.” But the cover photo of several slices of moldy bread made me cringe. We can all agree that handwashing is important. The experiment seemed to support that idea. So why did I cringe? The headline implied that the experiment showed how to prevent the spread of the flu. But the flu is caused by a virus. In fact, most of what makes us sick is viral or bacterial. But a virus and bacteria won’t grow on bread. The experiment actually had nothing to do with the flu or any illness.

What does the experiment tell us? It tells us that there are organisms, including bacteria and mold spores, on our hands and other surfaces. And washing our hands is the best way to get rid of these. Though the headline and cover photo were misleading, mold was still an effective, even stunning and disgusting, way to get that point across. A lab exercise like this one gives students the opportunity to recognize limitations. With the right guided discussion about what an experiment actually reveals, those limitations can be a hidden strength. They teach valuable thinking skills that just watching a video may not be able to teach.

Getting started at home

Laboratory experiences don’t have to be expensive. Many chemicals needed for experiments are already in your home. For example, you probably already have containers of baking soda, vinegar, table salt, and hydrogen peroxide. It’s possible to extract DNA from a strawberry using dish soap, a coffee filter, and rubbing alcohol. An experiment like this is ripe for questions and critical thinking. Can I extract DNA from a different fruit? What about table salt? My cheek cells? Why do I get different amounts of DNA out of different fruits or the cheek cells? What if my DNA extraction from cheek cells is no more productive than the table salt? What might have gone wrong? Can I try a different technique to improve my results?

You may be surprised how long your children will keep going if they are asking the right questions. Personally, I love it when my toddler is just having fun, but I know she’s learning. If you pay attention to what your child is naturally curious about, you can reap the most benefits.

• • • • •

Valerie is a wife and a mother to a very busy toddler. In her free time she enjoys reading all kinds of books. She earned a BS in Biology from Bob Jones University, minoring in Mathematics, and a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Ohio State University. Valerie has 15 years of experience working in research laboratories and has coauthored 8 original research articles. She has also taught several classes and laboratories at the high school and college levels. She currently works as a data analyst and a freelance writer.

Learning Together: The Heart of Teaching

by

learning together is the heart of teaching
Go back in time with me. Remember that moment—it may have been 20 years ago, or maybe it was a few months ago—when you started to seriously think about what this crazy homeschooling thing would look like for you. You had a picture in your head of you and your kids learning together. Maybe you saw your children huddled in your arms as you read to them. Maybe you saw books scattered on a table, forgotten, as you talked over the moral implications of the Civil War. Or maybe you saw yourself on a nature walk with your children, looking at birds, flowers, or the shapes of clouds together.

When that image came to you, you probably weren’t thinking about why you homeschool or what you hope to accomplish in the next twelve or more years. It was just a little dream of what your journey might look like day-to-day. And you know what the most important part of your dream was? You and your kids working together to learn something. That’s really all that education has ever been—teachers and students learning together.

But the problem is, there’s usually only one of you. When looking for solutions to their homeschool needs, many parents believe that the best resources are ones that their children can use completely independently. Just give the kids the textbook and let them go. Textbooks can be a key part of your homeschool, but they’re not the most important piece. A textbook just can’t replace what you can offer your children as a personal, involved teacher.

Children miss out when they only have a textbook.

You hear a lot about learning styles and customizing your children’s education to their needs. But the truth of the matter is, there’s no magic formula or combination to tell you how your child learns. No child is strictly a tactile learner, strictly a verbal learner, or strictly an auditory learner. Some kids are genuinely good at learning by reading from a textbook, but not all are. In fact, few can learn well from using only a textbook.

Most kids can’t just sit down with a book and siphon up information. They have to work with it to get it. They need to squish it through their fingers, taste it on their tongues, watch it bounce around, and hear what other people think about it. And a book can’t do all that. A book can present information, ask questions, give assignments, or even suggest activities. But it can’t hold a conversation or let a child really experience the information. Even a well-designed textbook will leave your children wanting if that’s all they have for their education.

If you’re involved in their learning process, you can customize their education. When you’re working one-on-one with your children, you’ll know which activities will help them learn and which won’t. It’s not about assigning every activity and hoping that doing them all will help them learn. It’s about picking the ones that are best for your child.

You can encourage understanding through communication.

When I was in high school, I remember moments when a teacher would misspeak or write the wrong number up on the board. Or there were times when students misheard or misunderstood something. When the class was comfortable and open with the teacher, the misunderstanding was usually something minor to fix. All we had to do was ask a clarifying question and we could move on. But there are some students who don’t feel comfortable asking simple questions. Who don’t want to interrupt no matter how confused they are.

Children need someone guiding them through their lessons to help them through moments of confusion. Someone they trust, who they can communicate with easily. My teachers weren’t always good at recognizing when they’d lost a student, but when you’re working directly with your children, learning together, you can usually tell when they’re following or when they’re still two pages behind.

It’s time for a reality check.

Now, we’ve been talking about an ideal—how things should be, and how things are meant to be. But we need to take a good hard look at how things are. Is this one-on-one teaching really possible for you? How many students are you teaching? How much time do you really have to devote to teaching your children yourself? If you’re going to have to spend 20 to 30 minutes teaching per subject and per child, then there’s no way you’ll have time for much of anything besides teaching, especially if you’re teaching more than 3 children. And that’s why you might want to allow your kids to work independently sometimes.

But remember that this isn’t school at home. You’re not confined to teaching specific subjects to specific children at specific times. You can shape your homeschool so that you can realize that dream you had when you started. And so that you and your children can go forward learning together. What will that look like? That’s up to you. It could mean year-round homeschooling. Or it could mean supplementing your teaching with video courses. Maybe it means forgetting about grade levels and teaching everyone together. The point is, it’s up to you how you make it work.

One-room school houses didn’t work because of government regulations and state standards. Having the right rules in place has never been the thing that makes classrooms work. They work because there’s a teacher invested in the lives of the students. At the end of the day, a textbook is just a tool. What children really need is for someone to direct them and partner with them in learning. And who better than you?

The Value of Handwriting Skills: Keep Writing

by

the value of handwriting skills
With technology always available, there are many skills we might think would become obsolete. Handwriting skills among them. After all, if we can type emails with our thumbs or dictate messages on our phones, what’s the point of writing something with our hands? And if there’s no point in keeping the skill, why should we have our kids learn it?

Is handwriting still a vital skill to train? As many homeschool parents know, things aren’t always as they seem. There’s more to handwriting skills than just putting pen to paper.

Handwriting skills are linked to motor skills.

One critical reason to encourage handwriting is the motor skills it develops. Handwriting challenges the writer to integrate gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and visual motor skills. Gross motor skills are the basic, larger muscle functions we use on a daily basis. Can your child maintain maintain posture and grip a pencil? Fine motor skills make small, subtle manipulations. Is your child able to write different words on a piece of paper? Mastering these skills helps children produce clear and consistent written work. Finally, visual motor skills are what we know as hand-eye coordination. How well can your child write what he sees?

Encouraging your children to learn and master handwriting requires them to use all three skill sets to process, understand, and copy what they see. Using all three skills together enables them to comprehend and use the information they learn each day.

Handwriting has a greater impact on us and other people.

The act of writing out our thoughts and what we hear is helpful in engaging in the learning process. As your children write, they’re using those motor skills as well as their mind to process information in a new format. Studies show that writing helps memory more than just typing on a computer. If your children keep their writing skills sharp, they will retain more of what they learn and function better on a daily basis.

Writing also often has a greater impact on other people than something typed. In an age of instant communication, taking the time to craft a handwritten note can mean so much more to the person reading. Handwriting is personal. You invest time to choose words and write carefully. A text or email takes seconds to punch out. If you teach your children to write personal messages to friends and family, they learn to communicate with more depth and intentionality than typing an email or sending an instant message.

Fluency in handwriting opens artistic potential.

One more reason that handwriting is important is that the skills go beyond everyday use. True, we can create all sorts of fun and interactive designs with our digital software. But often a Scripture verse or quote can come alive to you if you write it in an artistic form like calligraphy. Part of stewarding our creativity is using it to help us focus on God and remember His truths. Have you seen people Bible journaling by pulling out verses that have touched them and writing them in a beautiful script in the margins of their Bibles? Handwritten calligraphy, more than just an elegant typed font, can help us meditate and integrate valuable truths in our lives. By encouraging your children to hone artistic skills, you’re also giving them another tool to use to meditate on Scripture and encourage others.

Even though handwriting may be less common today, its impact on the reader is no less powerful. Training your children to write well and write clearly can help them be more influential as they grow older.

• • • • •

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.