The thought of writing a unit study was terribly overwhelming when I first began. After all, how can you possibly take one small topic and create an entire course of study around it?
That task can easily seem daunting and strike fear into the hearts of even the most seasoned of homeschoolers. But, it doesn’t have to.
Take it one step at a time and you’ll breeze right through the process. In the first three sections of this tutorial alone, you’ve already made quite a bit of progress!
Now is the time to grab a piece of paper and create a good, old-fashioned idea web. Here’s a good link, if you need a refresher.
So take one of those topics you came up with earlier and just brainstorm.
Or, if you’re more of a research-minded bookworm, go to the library and pick out a few books on the topic first and use them to help you brainstorm. (Don’t go crazy and get 20 books on the subject… just a few will suffice. We’ll discuss that more later.)
Once you’ve gotten your idea web down on paper, you can lay it out into a more useable outline. From the ideas that you listed, categorize them under the major curricular areas where they belong.
This outline will help you to discover any areas you might have wanted to cover but haven’t included or areas in which you’ve just got too much going on.
It will also help you to uncover rabbit trails… those little learning detours that flow naturally from the study of your chosen topic. Take some time to make sure you are happy with your outline.
From here, it shouldn’t be difficult at all to flesh out your unit study, if you choose to do that.
Depending on the ability level of your student or students, you might choose to do either a unit study starter or a complete unit study.
What’s the difference?
For an older, more independent, student you might simply do a study starter. This is where you would simply turn your outline into a list of expectations for your student and let him do all of the research.
Likely, you’d want to do the research beforehand for a younger student or for multiple age groups. So follow your own outline and fill in the blanks.
Get those books from the library, if you haven’t done so already, and answer your own questions.
Write out any hands-on activities or projects that you have in mind.
Print out any worksheets that you want to include.
Compile a list of any web links you want to follow or any extra reading you want your child to do (again with those library books!) and include that as part of your unit study.
When finished, a complete unit study should ideally contain all of the information you’ll need to learn about the topic you’ve chosen.
Shannon’s Note:
If you prefer to create that Idea Web on your computer instead, I really like FreeMind mind mapping software, it’s free and fairly easy to use. I have it on both my netbook and my main computer and use it for unit studies, planning out the year, to do lists, when I’m stuck on a writing project ….you get the idea.
Coming Next Week: Homeschool Unit Studies: All Those Library Books
Until then, enjoy!
…Shannon
P.S. If you need help with FreeMind or want some great tips for using mindmaps, I highly suggest checking out Bob the Teacher’s step by step video training – Discover Freemind. You can also get the Freemind software free there too.
This first question has many answers and all of them are correct. For a complete unit study, it is a good idea to try to include activities from all of the subjects you would normally teach. But, you don’t have to.
Read that again.
You don’t have to include every subject.
You should include what you feel is important to the study of your selected topic and follow those trails that spring naturally from its study.
Including applied math in a unit study on safety is quite possible, but don’t feel that you have to force it into the unit if it just doesn’t flow in the direction you want it to.
Remember, part of the beauty of creating and using a unit study is the freedom of being able to study, on your own terms, a topic or theme that you and your student have a real interest in.
It is the freedom of being able to follow those little detours that naturally spring from a child’s curiosity. This is not textbook teaching and it should not be made to conform to that style of learning.
For those who like it laid out, though, here is a partial list of some of the subjects that can be incorporated into a unit study.
Reading comprehension / literature connections
Writing activities
Handwriting practice via copywork
Grammar concepts
Vocabulary
Applied math (such as measuring); word problems; graphing
Science experiments or exploration into related science topics
Bible study or memorization
Character traits
Social studies concepts – mapping, history, cultural connections, community connections
Research skills
Field trips and webquests
Art projects, art history, picture study, artist study
Music study
Life skills connections – cooking, service projects, etc.
Again, this is just a partial list of the myriad of subjects that can be incorporated into your unit study.
So what about holes in your child’s learning?
Simply answered, there are holes in every education. Not every chapter is covered in every textbook. Kids get sick and miss a few lessons and will never recover every single bit of information from those days that they missed.
As children, we were most likely not taught every single piece of information that should have been taught.
Every education has gaps and we will never be able to teach our students everything. Thinking that we can teach them everything is, while admirable, quite unrealistic.
The goal of a unit study is not so much to cover every bit of information that’s out there, but to foster in our students the love of learning and the motivation to learn more on their own. With those tools, they’ll be presented with a tremendous opportunity to learn as much as they want.
So now that we’ve got some topics picked out and we know what areas we can cover within those topics, let’s talk about how to put it all together.
**UPDATE**
Tina is about to start a new, huge monster of a unit study, and she volunteered to let you and I follow along as she creates it. This is the perfect opportunity to learn exactly how she goes about putting together a study. J
Interested? Just enter your email address below and we’ll send you Tina’s updates whenever they are ready!
Part 2 in our How to Write Homeschool Unit Studies series by Tina Franks
Now that you know what homeschool unit studies are, let’s talk about Choosing a Topic for your unit study….
There are endless options when it comes to choosing a topic for a unit study. Think about what your student is passionate about. Think about what you’re planning to learn this year and what could be made more interesting by allowing your child to study it in a variety of ways.
If it can be taught, it can most likely be turned into a unit study, large or small.
A Literature Unit Study
One type of unit study, and a topic of discussion in its own right, is the literature unit. Perhaps you’ve chosen several read-alouds for the year. A unit can be written around one of these selections.
Literature very easily lends itself to this type of study because it naturally stimulates all of our senses and our entire knowledge-base.
Grammar concepts can be introduced and reinforced through the reading of a good book, as can new vocabulary words. e.g, What is the setting of the story?
Reading comprehension and writing activities are a given in a literature study.
History, geography and science can easily be extracted and rabbit trails followed.
e.g., What’s the climate like there?
Can you find it on the map?
What was life like there during a specific period in history?
Biblical and character-building principles, too, can be gleaned from a literature selection. Talk about the characters and their actions. What can we learn from them? What Bible verses apply?
A picture study of the illustrations in the book is also an easy path to expand upon.
Shannon’s note: For a quick example of a literature unit study, check out my free Robinson Crusoe unit study
A Topical Unit Study
Then, of course, you have the topical unit study, where you study a variety subjects based on one topic. Here are just a handful of examples of topical unit studies:
Science – migration, gravity, birds of prey
Social Studies – ancient China, your home state, the Mayan culture, St. Patrick’s Day
Life Skills – cooking, safety, responsibility
Bible – Noah, creation, life during Jesus’ time
This list could go on indefinitely, but you get the idea. Anything you or your students are interested in studying is fair game for a unit study. Rabbit trails are followed and curricular areas are expanded upon in the same manner you would in a literature study.
What Do You Want to Study?
So sit down and write out a few topics that you’d like to study. Once you’ve chosen a topic, you can decide on some of the subjects that be incorporated into its study.
Shannon’s Note: Seriously this is that simple – just pick a book or a topic that you want to study, and then build your unit study from there. Right now I’m working on an Africa unit study with the kids – which I’m writing as a I go along.
Most topics can be turned into a cross-curricular unit study without too much effort, the biggest challenge is knowing what to include and how deep to go. But Tina will get into that next…
Tina is about to start a new, huge monster of a unit study, and she volunteered to let you and I follow along as she creates it. This is the perfect opportunity to learn exactly how she goes about putting together a study. J
Interested? Just enter your email address below and we’ll send you Tina’s updates whenever they are ready!
Okay, I promised one more free heart-healthy cookbook, so here it is. The very last one in this heart healthy series.
This is an older version of the print version of the Keep the Beat Cookbook I shared with you earlier.
Also called Keep the Beat Heart Healthy Recipes from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, this version has 156 pages of heart healthy recipes and advice on how to cook heart healthy.
The recipes have more of a down home American feel to them, and cover quite a few categories, including:
Appetizers
Soups (yum – minestrone soup is included!)
Main dish meats including beef, chicken, and fish, - and lamb, pork, and veal which you don’t often see.
Homechool unit studies have been a fun way for us to engage as a family and study together. I don’t always use them, but when I do, the kids are thrilled, and so is my budget.
Unit studies can be a very low-cost homeschool curriculum option, especially if you use free unit studies or create your own. All you need is a plan, some great books, and a little bit of time.
While I do put together my own studies, if I can’t find one I need online and I’m short on time or motivation, I ask my friend, Tina Franks, to put one together for me. Tina is awesome at unit studies – especially ones around literature or when you want lapbooking pages too.
When she offers a lapbooking or unit study class at her home, I send my kids – cuz they *love* Ms. Tina and her three kids, so much so they love to volunteer to go “help out” Ms. Tina.
In fact, here’s a picture of Tina and Kate taken here in March 2011 when K was helping Tina out for a few hours.
Tina Franks and Kate, March 2011
So when I got this idea to do this homeschool unit study series, that we are about to embark on, I asked Tina to help me out with it.
So, on Mondays for the next 7 weeks, Tina will be guest blogging here, with a primer on how to write your own homeschool unit studies from scratch. Starting with:
Before we can talk about writing our own unit studies, we should make sure we all know what they are. So what is a unit study, anyway?
Simply put, a unit study is the cross-curricular study of a specific theme or topic. A topic, such as snow, is thoroughly explored and expanded upon from all angles, incorporating many subject areas (art, music, applied math, language arts, literature, science, social studies, character, writing, etc.).
Unit studies can be adapted for any age range or combination of age ranges. They can be short-lived or lengthy. They can be highly structured or left up to the student to expand upon.
There is a great deal of freedom in learning through unit studies. Let’s start at the beginning…
Shannon’s Note: One of my favorite things about homeschool unit studies is that there is flexibility, flexibility to educate across multiple ages, like we are doing with our geology unit study, and the flexibility to delve as deep or as shallow as you need or want, or have time for. The kids will often dive much deeper on their own time and accord if something catches their interest.
**UPDATE**
Tina is about to start a new, huge monster of a unit study, and she volunteered to let you and I follow along as she creates it. This is the perfect opportunity to learn exactly how she goes about putting together a study.
Interested? Just enter your email address below and we’ll send you Tina’s updates whenever they are ready!
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