The California Christian Educator
Tips, tricks, and teaching methods for the people God put in the classroom
“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” — Proverbs 25:11
Sixty days, one letter, and a page that belongs to you
Thank you to everyone who signed up at the GSACS convention in October. Most of you teach in Stockton, Lodi, and the valley towns between, and several of you told me the same thing at the table: you would rather read something you can use Monday than something that makes you feel behind. That is the whole idea here, and this issue tries to earn it.
Two things need your attention before Christmas. The first is a date. California has until January 1 to say yes to a federal program that would put scholarship money into Christian school classrooms at no cost to the state, and Sacramento has not answered. There is a letter on these pages you can put on your school's letterhead this week. The second is a page. I told everyone at the convention that page 2 of the printed issue was theirs, and I meant it. The invitation is below. The first letter we print will be from one of you.
Two more things in this issue. Parent-teacher conference season is here, and the five tips on the last page are for it. And if you have a second grader who still guesses at words from the first letter, the Method of the Month is for him.
This page is yours
Write the next one.
Every issue from here on carries one letter from a working teacher, principal, or pastor, printed on this page with your name and your school. It does not need to be polished. It needs to be true. Tell the rest of us the thing you figured out the hard way: the routine that finally settled your first graders, the conference that changed how you talk to parents, the lesson that fell apart and what you did the next morning.
I will fix a comma or trim a sentence for space. I will not rewrite you. If you are not sure you have something to say, you do. Start with the sentence “What I wish somebody had told me is…” and keep going.
Three AI jobs you can hand off this week without breaking a commandment
Last month this newsletter printed the Ten Commandments of AI for the Christian classroom. Several of you wrote back with the same fair question: fine, but what is it actually good for? Here are three jobs that pass the test. None of them touches the teaching. Each one keeps student names out of the machine and ends with you reading every word before it goes anywhere. The commandments are reprinted at the end of this section so you can check the work.
1. Translating a parent letter into a family's home language
Half the families in some of our schools speak Spanish at home, and a few speak Tagalog, Russian, or Korean. The field-trip letter goes home in English and a ten-year-old translates it at the kitchen table. The machine can do the first pass in seconds. A person checks it.
2. Polishing a parent letter you already wrote
The letter about the field trip, the note about the missing permission slips, the paragraph explaining the new homework policy. You wrote it at 9:40 at night and it reads that way. Let the machine tidy it. Do not let it write it.
3. Boiling a long document down for the faculty meeting
The forty-page Treasury regulation on the scholarship credit. The new handbook section from the board. The hour-long in-service video the principal wants everyone to have seen. Somebody has to read it and tell the rest of the faculty what matters in five minutes. Let the machine do the first read; you do the deciding.
Notice what is not on this list. Lesson plans, because a good curriculum already wrote them, day by day, and wrote them better than a machine guessing at your grade level. Grading and report-card comments, because that is where a teacher's judgment lives. And anything with a student's name in it, because that is a line we do not cross.
Sixty days left for California to say yes
The October issue explained the new federal scholarship tax credit: starting January 1, 2027, any taxpayer can give up to $1,700 a year to a scholarship granting organization and get all of it back as a federal tax credit, and that organization awards K–12 scholarships to families earning up to 300 percent of the area median income. The money is federal. Not one dollar comes from Sacramento. But a state has to opt in, and as this issue goes to press, California still has not.
- The deadline
- Jan. 1, 2027, for the state's election; Feb. 15 for its list of scholarship organizations
- States in
- 31, including Nevada, which opted in last January
- California
- No decision. The Governor's office has not commented.
- Who is asking
- 121 California school and faith leaders, in a letter to the Governor dated Oct. 23
The argument against, as it is being made in Sacramento, is that California does not let state money flow to private or religious schools. That is true and it is beside the point. This program spends no state money. A California donor who gives $1,700 to a scholarship organization gets $1,700 off his federal taxes either way. If California is in, the scholarship lands in a California classroom. If California is out, the same donor gives to an organization in Nevada or Arizona, takes the same credit, and the scholarship lands there. The only thing the Governor decides is which state's children benefit from California donors' money.
Nevada schools, for those of you who work across the line, are already preparing. Their scholarship organizations are being certified now, and the first gifts can be made January 1.
Send a letter. Not a form letter from an advocacy group; one from your school, on your letterhead, signed by your principal and board chair, with your enrollment and your town in it. The Governor's office counts these. Here is a draft you can use as is or cut down. Mail it, and post it on your school's social media the same day.
The Honorable Gavin Newsom
Governor of California
1021 O Street, Suite 9000
Sacramento, CA 95814
Dear Governor Newsom,
I am the principal of [School Name] in [Town], a Christian school serving [number] students in grades [K–12]. [Number] of our families earn less than 300 percent of area median income, and most of them make real sacrifices to keep their children here.
I am writing to ask you to make California's advance election to participate in the federal scholarship tax credit before January 1, 2027. The program costs the State of California nothing. It allows California donors to direct up to $1,700 each in federal tax credits toward scholarships for California children. If the state does not opt in, those same donors will claim the same credit by giving to scholarship organizations in other states, and the scholarships will go to children in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas instead of children in [Town].
Thirty-one states have already opted in. Our families are watching to see whether California will let its own donors help its own children. Please opt in.
Respectfully,
[Name], Principal
[Name], Board Chair
[School Name], [Town], California
Nothing here is tax or legal advice. Facts as of October 28, 2026: Treasury temporary and proposed regulations under §25F (T.D. 10057, Oct. 1, 2026); Revenue Procedure 2026-6 on state advance elections; Nevada Governor's office, Jan. 23, 2026; EdSource and other reporting on California's status; the Oct. 23, 2026 letter from 121 school and faith leaders (Teach Coalition and others). The Governor's mailing address is the one published by the Governor's office.
Blend ladders: take the guesswork out of reading
You know the child. Second grade, bright, reads the first letter of a word and guesses the rest from the picture. “Horse” becomes “house.” By November the guessing is a habit. Abeka's kindergarten phonics training has a name for the cure, and it is the plainest tool in the program: the blend ladder.
A blend, in Abeka's definition, is a consonant and a vowel put together and sounded together. It is step three of the six steps of intensive phonics: short vowels, consonants, blending, the one-vowel rule, long vowels, special sounds. Blending is where speed and accuracy are built, and those two are the whole goal of reading. Here is the drill as the teacher-training session lays it out.
- Put a ladder on the board. The Blend Ladders teaching aid runs every consonant down the side and the five short vowels across: ba be bi bo bu, ca ke ki co cu, and on through za ze zi zo zu. Three rows a day is plenty.
- Sound it, then say it. Point. The class gives the consonant sound, the vowel sound, then the blend: “b, ă, ba.” Down the column, across the row.
- Mix it up. The training is specific: challenge the students to read the blends quickly, mix up the order you point to, and turn the ladder over for variety. A child who can only read the ladder in order has memorized a pattern, not learned to blend.
- Sing it. The Blend Song, to the tune of “Skip to My Lou”: Ba, be, bi, bo, bu three times, then I can read blends and so can you! It is a free download at abeka.com.
- Then the one-vowel rule. Once blends are automatic, put up fed. Train the child to ask, before he guesses or says “I don't know”: How many vowels? One. What does it say? Its short sound; mark it with a smile. Sound it out: fe-d, fed. Look, don't guess.
That last line is the point of the whole method. Steps one through six give a child the tools to read 85 percent of English words on sight-sound alone, and the guesser is a child who was never made to use them. In an Abeka kindergarten the ladders live in My Blend and Word Book and the daily phonics review; the Basic Phonics Flashcards and Practice Blend Cards keep every student accountable for every sound. For a second grader who missed it, two minutes of ladder a day for a month puts the foundation under him. If your school would like the full session, Teaching Phonics, with an in-service certificate for each teacher, ask Rocky.
Five for parent-teacher conference season
- Make the good phone call first. Before conferences, call every parent once with one true, specific good thing. Two minutes each. The parent who has only ever heard from you about a problem walks into the conference braced for a fight. The parent who got the good call walks in on your team.
- Bring three things, not thirty. Three pieces of the child's work and your observation notes, in a folder with the child's name on it. Parents do not need the whole portfolio. They need to see that you know their child.
- One struggle, not the list. If a child is immature, unmotivated, uncooperative, and behind in math, pick the one that is holding the others back and talk about that one. A parent can work on one thing this month. Nobody can work on four.
- Let them finish. Do not interrupt, do not defend, do not fill the silence. First impressions of a family are not always right, and the parent who is talking is telling you how to reach the child.
- End with thanks, and mean it. “Thank you for trusting us with him.” Then one line about what happens next and when you will follow up. Write the date down in front of them.
These five come straight from Abeka's in-service session Effective Classroom Management, Part 1: Begin with the Parents, which walks a faculty through the whole conference season in an hour and comes with a certificate for each teacher. If your school would like it on a Friday afternoon, ask Rocky.
Past issues: October 2026