BJU Press Blog

Meal Planning to Save Your Day—and Your Budget

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meal planning menu
It’s that time of day again. The kids are starting to whine and grumble. They’re getting hungry, and it’s only a matter of time before chaos ensues. You throw open the fridge or pantry, desperately looking for something that you can cook quickly—something that even your picky eaters will like—but it seems you never have the right ingredients on hand.

What if you could spare yourself the stress of last-minute meals and make your grocery shopping process much easier? Meal planning is a way to have less stress (and more money since you’re not spending extra dollars on takeout or impulse buys at the grocery store). Here are some meal-planning tips from real moms to get you started.

• Create a monthly meal schedule

Take the advice of homeschool mom Erica and decide in advance what you and your family are going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for thirty days. Monday could be cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and fruit for lunch, and spaghetti with garlic bread for dinner. Tuesday could be pancakes for breakfast, leftover spaghetti for lunch, chicken broccoli casserole for dinner, and so on. If a month feels like too much, start by planning out the meals for just one week. Having a plan trims your grocery list to the essentials and takes the mealtime decision-making off your mind.

• Have fun with the plan

One way to make your meal plan more interesting is to create themed days or weeks. One week could feature Mexican foods; another might highlight Italian or Asian cuisine. You could also give each day of the week a theme, like Meatless Mondays, Taco Tuesdays, and so on. Ask your kids to help you brainstorm the themes for each week, or let them plan all the meals for one day every month.

• Make multiple meals at once

Set aside an afternoon or an evening to cook several meals at one time. You can make casseroles and freeze them, or double your recipe for soup or chili so you’ll have leftovers for a few nights. Make a lot of pasta and divide it into smaller containers for lunches. If you’re just cooking up some chicken or ground beef, brown an extra pound or two and freeze it; that’s time saved on another day. This tip is courtesy of Kim, busy homeschool mom and blogger at NotConsumed.com.

• Give your food budget a makeover

Every homeschool family could use a little spare change in their food budget, and meal planning can help with that. If you’re looking to do ultra-cheap meal planning, check out these 75 easy, budget friendly meals the whole family will love.

• Allow yourself some takeout time  

You can still eat takeout occasionally or visit your favorite restaurant. Just be sure that you include your weekly pizza night or monthly visit to the local seafood restaurant in your meal plan. After all, you’re saving money with a meal plan; there’s nothing wrong with eating out once in a while.

Remember, modern dads and moms have plenty of kitchen help, thanks to microwaves, freezers, dishwashers, slow cookers, electric grills, vegetable steamers, and rice cookers. Use those tools to save time as you plan ahead and prepare tasty, affordable meals for your family.

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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.

How My Family Benefited from Standardized Testing

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standardized testing bubbles
Have you ever wondered if your homeschooled child is falling behind? One of the challenges of homeschooling is that it is difficult to know whether or not your child is on track academically. I found this to be true in my own homeschool.

My two oldest children are different in almost every way possible. Their personalities are different, their hair color is different, their likes and dislikes are different—and their academic strengths are different. My firstborn learned to read quickly. When we sat down to read the phonics stories in K5, she always read them with ease and had no trouble answering the accompanying comprehension questions. By the end of K5, she was reading short chapter books. I had no worries about her academic performance—I knew she was excelling.

But then my second daughter started K5. Unlike her older sister, she struggled through those K5 phonics stories and word family lists. No matter how much we practiced, she didn’t seem to be catching on. And I began to get worried. Was she falling behind? Did she need a reading tutor? A different curriculum?

An Objective Measurement

Standardized testing was so helpful to me in this situation because it provided me with an objective measure of my daughter’s academic performance. Instead of comparing her performance with only her sister’s, the results compared my daughter with a much larger group of other kindergartners (called a norm).  I felt like she was falling behind, but her standardized test results indicated that she was actually right on track.

A Sense of Assurance

You could compare doing standardized testing with getting a checkup at the doctor’s office. At those doctor’s visits, I’m always interested in knowing if my children are staying on their growth curve. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to me that they have gained much weight or gotten much taller, so it is always reassuring to me when my pediatrician shows me that they are still developing normally.

It’s the same with standardized testing. Such tests aren’t a perfect measurement, so they shouldn’t be the only assessment tool you use to evaluate your child’s academic performance. Throughout the year, you can also use chapter tests, section quizzes, lesson interactivity, and projects to evaluate learning. But yearly standardized testing can be very beneficial, especially when you need assurance that your child is staying on track.

Help in Identifying Academic Weaknesses

Standardized test scores are also useful because they help you discern if your child is falling behind. Since standardized tests are no-stakes tests, you don’t have to be afraid of poor test scores—they don’t mean that you’re a homeschool failure, just as a medical diagnosis doesn’t mean that you’ve failed as a parent. And low test scores don’t mean that your child is somehow unintelligent. They should only be viewed as opportunities for growth and improvement. If you need help knowing how to reinforce academically weak areas, your local HomeWorks consultant or a BJU Press representative is available to assist you.

My children and I really look forward to standardized testing each spring. For me, it’s an opportunity to give them an academic checkup. For them, it’s a chance to get together with friends and enjoy special snacks and extra playtime. Keep an eye out for Jenna’s next post, in which she will share some ideas for making testing fun and stress-free so it can be a great experience for everyone.

Take the Stress out of Standardized Testing

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standardized testing bubble sheet
Standardized Testing can be stressful.

It’s cool in homeschooling circles to hate standardized testing. Since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, standardized testing has had a huge impact on public schools. Many parents and classroom teachers alike have pushed back. Their distaste for standardized testing has reached into the homeschool movement as well.

Of course, there are legitimate concerns about the overuse of these “bubble tests.” They can’t tell everything about a child or a teacher, but government bureaucracy relies on the scores to judge both. And that leads to one of the biggest problems with big government testing—it’s creating what’s called high-stakes testing.

High-Stakes Testing

Standardized tests have far-reaching implications for the test-takers. Your score on a high-stakes test might determine if you pass a course or if you get into medical school. Preparing for such tests becomes all-consuming for a student and introduces copious amounts of stress into the test-taking  experience.

Low-Stakes Testing

In contrast, low-stakes tests have limited impact on the test-takers. Such a test contributes to determining a student’s grade or placement, but the test is only one small part of the grade or one factor among several. Think of a yearlong course with fifteen tests. Each test matters, but none of them is a make-or-break situation by itself. If you fail one test, you can make up ground later on. These tests place some pressure on a child but not overwhelming stress.

No-Stakes Testing

What kind of test would have little to no impact on the test-taker? That’s the case when the results are only for the parents’ benefit or to set the child up for what he or she is going to learn next. One example would be a pre-test you give your child over what you plan to teach, but there is no grade on the test. This test puts no pressure on the child to perform at a certain level but informs you about what your child needs help with since the results provide clear insight into the child’s knowledge and skill level.

Removing the Stakes

The key to successfully using standardized testing is to remove the stakes. Make sure your children know that these tests won’t determine their grades or whether they go on to the next grade. Let them know that they should do their best because you want to know how great they’re doing. But also tell them that their results won’t change how proud you are of them.

As a homeschooler growing up, I was tested in our homeschool group every year; my mom made sure of that. But she always told me to do my best and not to worry about the results. I knew she used the results somehow, and I thought it was to determine what grade I would be in the next year.

Then the day I finished third-grade standardized testing, as I climbed into our white minivan, I glanced in the front seat. There I saw a bag containing all my fourth-grade curriculum. “Mom!” I said. “How do you know how I did on my tests? I just finished!”

My mom explained to me that my standardized tests didn’t determine what grade I was going into. She already knew I was ready for the next grade.

That experience changed my view of testing. I knew that my academic career didn’t hinge on the test.

Homeschool families test for a variety of reasons. You may test because you find it provides valuable feedback. Or perhaps you have to test because you live in one of the twenty-two states that require it. In any case, consider eliminating the stakes.

Two Questions

This advice raises two questions, which we’ll address in upcoming blog posts. First, if there aren’t any stakes, why test? So in our next post, my wife will talk about some benefits we’ve seen through testing our daughters.

The second question that arises is how to remove the stakes and make mind-numbing bubble-filling tests fun. Jenna will post six tips on how to make standardized testing enjoyable for children.

 

Adding a Reading Hour to Your Homeschool

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One of my earliest memories about reading was curling up on the couch with my mom and my two brothers as she read us the first chapter of The Hobbit. For some reason, she never finished reading the book to us. But I was so fascinated with Tolkien’s description of a hobbit hole that I felt I had to learn to read just to find out what happened. At least, that’s what I tell people. This was the first and only reading hour that my family ever did.

Ever since then, I’ve always thought of a family reading hour as one element of an ideal family. So I loved hearing about Dynel, a homeschool mom of ten, and her family’s reading hour.

In her family, everyone gets together every day in their special reading corner, and Dynel reads to them for about an hour. Even her youngest kids join in, and they’ve all learned valuable skills in stillness and attentiveness. During their reading hour, Dynel and her family have worked through many classic works of literature. She finds that reading aloud lets her select or adapt the material she reads. She makes the books either more understandable or addresses inappropriate elements.

If you want to add a reading hour in addition to your normal reading instruction, here are some additional ways you could set it up. Your reading hour should be fun, so if you or your children get frustrated with one approach, try a different setup.

Dad’s Reading Hour

One family I know has their reading hour at night right after dinner. The father is often away for long hours at work. Reading together as a family gives the children a chance to connect with Dad. He gets to learn what makes them laugh, and they get to share some valuable moments of stillness outside of the hustle and bustle of the day. Dads might especially enjoy reading these adventure-focused books aloud.

Reading Aloud

If you want to build your children’s confidence and skill in reading aloud, try taking turns while reading. You can assign a different reader each night or alternate readers from page to page, or even paragraph to paragraph. But experienced readers may get frustrated, and less experienced readers may feel overwhelmed by long passages. Remember that reading hour should be fun. So if it isn’t working for one of your readers, you should drop the activity. Keeping all reading times short lets everyone practice, and it makes sure everyone’s happy. These selections from a variety of genres and reading levels help keep everyone interested. Seasonal Christmas books are also especially good for read aloud reading hours.

Reading Silently 

Not every book should be read aloud. And not everyone has the same amount of interest in the topic of a book. For these kinds of situations, you can spend your reading hour reading separate books silently. After your children finish their books, or at the end of every hour, they can share the highlights and what they learned with their siblings. This would work well for informational books and biographies. If your boys put up a fuss about reading “girl books,” independent reading hours are a perfect time for your daughters to read about excellent female heroines and then explain why the boys should read them too. Even the little ones can get involved with books on their level.

Your family’s reading hour may wind up being somewhere between Dynel’s experience and mine as far as regularity is concerned. Even though I don’t remember my mother ever reading aloud to us again, there were many, many evenings that we spent reading together from then on.

 

This post was updated on 3/14/2018 for the purpose of clarifying terms.

The Enduring Appeal of The Pilgrim’s Progress

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Pilgrim's Progress in a field
Journey is the primary motif of Pilgrim’s Progress.

In most of the world, the Bible is the only book that has been more widely read than The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. This classic allegory of the Christian life has appeared in over four thousand English-language editions and has been translated into scores of other languages. Generation after generation, people have found blessing and help in its pages. Why all this popularity, and what does it mean for you and your homeschool family? Is this 339-year-old story relevant to you and your kids?

The Power of a Well-Told Story

Everyone enjoys a story, and the story of Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City communicates truth in a powerful and memorable way. There are interesting characters, lively conversations, new places, and dramatic scenes.

When it was written in 1678, The Pilgrim’s Progress depicted characters and events that felt realistic to readers of the time. To modern readers, the people and places in the book have an old-fashioned, almost fairytale feel to them. Yet the events of this allegory still reveal timeless truths about salvation, right living, and the importance of staying on the path of faith.

The Wording and Language of The Pilgrim’s Progress

Bunyan was a man of the people. Most of his positive characters are commoners, and he wrote in a relaxed conversational style, using the informal, lively language of rural common folk in seventeenth-century England. However, the wording of the book is dramatically different from the conversational language of today. For this reason and others, we recommend The Pilgrim’s Progress for high-school students, especially those in tenth grade and above.

Encourage your teens to have a dictionary or smartphone handy so they can look up the meanings of difficult words or antiquated phrases. BJU Press offers a helpful Teacher’s Guide that has marginal notes, vocabulary information, and discussion questions to help you teach the book effectively. If you’d like to introduce the story to younger children, you can find excellent abridged or adapted versions to use until they are ready for the real thing. One well-loved children’s version is Dangerous Journey, retold by Oliver Hunkin and beautifully illustrated.

The Different Types of Believers

There’s an interesting inclusivity in The Pilgrim’s Progress, which allows for the different Christian life experiences believers may have. As a pastor and a close observer of individuals, Bunyan gave his three main characters—Christian, Faithful, and Hopeful—different weaknesses, unique strengths, and a variety of experiences. As you study the book together during your homeschool sessions, your children may be able to see their own traits and tendencies reflected in the characters.

The Role of the Allegory

From an educational perspective, The Pilgrim’s Progress is important in the development of literary genres. It’s an allegory, not a novel or fable; but the characters and narrative make it an important forerunner of the novel. Bunyan made his major characters and many of his minor characters both lifelike and varied. Thus, The Pilgrim’s Progress has great value as a literary work as well as a realistic story that expounds themes of salvation, temptation, the Christian’s armor, and the benefits of Christian fellowship.

Are you ready to dive into The Pilgrim’s Progress as part of your homeschool? Study it along with your high school students so you can benefit from the literary and spiritual enrichment as well!

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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.