For those of us who grew up in a conventional school, our schooling, our formal “learning”, took place in a classroom, with periodic field trip outings.
When most people think of homeschooling, they think of schooling taking place at the kitchen table or some formal school room in your house. Like this:
And obviously, from this picture of Z, our kitchen table is often covered in school related materials, usually K’s math or Little E’s art projects.
But, the kitchen table or classroom is not the only place “schooling” should takes place. In fact, I urge you to consider it a last resort.
While some studies, like K’s Algebra, suit themselves well to the kitchen table or a classroom, we limit our kids’ education if we restrict their learning to this one little spot of the world.
True education, true learning, happens every day, in every location. It comes from practically being involved in the world, in life.
We learn not just from “school books”, but from real books, from experiences, from labor, from conversations, from being outdoors, from being involved.
We can study books about animal and plant life all we want, but it’s not the same as getting up close and personal with real live animals, insects, and plants.
Our kids can watch videos about survival skills and study pictures of history, but it’s not quite the same as going out and creating their own re-inactments, building their own huts, and foraging for materials in their environment. Finding the right branches and mud, and figuring out just how it should go together.
Nothing tests that knowledge like spending a raining day hanging out in the hut you built yourself.
Life is about presenting ideas, sharing ideas, and having lots of discussions. It’s about being involved in projects, working together with others, and sharing your own skills and perspectives to fill your own unique spot in the world.
I encourage you to seek out life with your kids, to do life with your kids. Let them explore and find out where they fit, where they shine, what they are passionate about, and what they need to figure out to get to where they want to go.
School Books can go just about anywhere. They do not need to be relegated to the kitchen table, they can be taken outside…
or in the car…
Find a tree to hang out in, a hammock to kick back in, or a simply just lay out on the grass and taken in the world.
You never know what you’ll learn and experience by expanding the world beyond the classroom or the kitchen table. This world is amazing, there are so many things to see and experience. School should not hamper our children’s education, but expand it.
So You’ve finished writing out this unit study. Now what do You do with it?
How do You use it?
How you go about teaching your unit study depends on a great number of factors. Before we discuss those, remember again that that beauty of learning with unit studies is the freedom they provide to really learn about a topic.
While it’s great to set some goals for completing the study, don’t feel like you have to force yourself to run through it in a week. Take the time you and your student need to learn and enjoy the learning process.
But how long should it take?
The answer to this question depends on how wide of a topic you’ve chosen to study.
A study on a children’s picture book might take a week, while a study on Ancient China might take a month or more. The broader the topic you’ve chosen and the more you’ve included, the longer it’ll take to go through.
Let common sense and realism be your guide when planning and, above all, allow yourself the flexibility to take an extra few days or even weeks if you’re really enjoying what you’re doing.
Foster that love of learning in your students and they’ll learn so much more!
But how do I teach it?
Just because I’ve suggested flexibility in the duration of your unit study doesn’t mean that it might not be prudent to come up with a loose plan on what to cover and when. Many people choose to break up the subjects in a unit study, dedicating one day a week to one or two specific subject areas.
For a smaller unit study, like the children’s picture book mentioned above, you might choose to cover the language arts aspects of the study on Monday, the social studies aspects on Tuesday, science on Wednesday, math and art on Thursday, and field trips or miscellaneous projects on Friday.
For a larger unit study, like Ancient China, you might choose to allocate one day to a certain sub-topic within a subject or several sub-topics from a couple subject areas per day.
You know your teaching style better than anyone else. You know your student better than anyone else. And by know, you’ve probably got a pretty good grasp of the topic at hand. Use this knowledge as your guide and schedule your day, your week, your month accordingly.
But I’m teaching several children on several different ability levels. How can I make this work?
Again, unit studies are flexible. You’ve done all of the research already. The information that an older child will study can be adapted so that a younger child can participate.
Your older student, if he or she is reading well independently, can read that literature go-along to the younger children. While the older child is writing a report on it, the younger child can draw a picture. Everyone can participate in experiments and art projects.
We include the younger kids in what we do around the house every day, so finding ways to include them in our unit studies is really no different. Once again, common sense and your knowledge of your particular situation should guide you here.
Coming Next in this Series: Homeschool Unit Studies:Creating Your Own v.s. Buying Premade
P.S. Want to learn more about writing your own unit studies? Sign up below to Follow along (for free) as Tina shows exactly how she creates her latest homeschool unit study
You may have noticed back in part four that I included a warning about the number of library books to include in the research process. I feel it’s important to spend a few minutes talking about this… to save you some undue stress.
I call it the “TMI-trap.” We’ve all done it.
You go to the library, you’ve got three kids in tow, and you need to get some books on a certain topic that they’re supposed to be studying. So you grab a backpack and fill it to bursting with everything on the subject that you can find at the library, intending to look through the collection when you get home and decide which ones to use, because you know you don’t have a chance of sitting down at the library and deciding.
While the free time at home does pop up every once in a while for the typical busy homeschool mom to be able to do that, more times than not you’re just stuck with a backpack full of mostly untouched library books that you’ll have to lug back to the library in a few weeks.
Please don’t stress yourself out like that.
More information is great, sure, but taking a few minutes at home to research what’s available will save you a great deal of frustration and prevent you from getting overwhelmed and throwing in the unit study writing towel.
Many library systems have an online catalog that will search by topic and then let you further narrow that search by branch (if you’re in a system of libraries) or language or type of book. Check out what’s available if you can. If the descriptions from your library are vague or you don’t have an online catalog to use, do your research on Amazon.com.
Get an idea of which books you’d really like to use and take that list to the library.
Choosing a handful of quality resources over a dozen random books on the topic will both save you time and sanity in the writing process and make the study much more fun for your student. (You might follow this same advice when it comes to web links and worksheets, as well. More is not always better!)
P.S. Want to learn more about writing your own unit studies? Follow along as Tina shows exactly how she creates her latest homeschool unit study – a study based on her son’s passion for the Godzilla movies. Just sign up below to follow along for free:
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.
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!
or in the car… 
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