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Unit Studies

Unit Studies can be a great way to cover learning in many subject areas and show children how subject relate to each other. They can also be great for teaching multiple ages at once. However, they can be time intensive for mom in preparation time.

The good news is, they don't have to be. You can either get unit study plans that are already designed for you relatively inexpensively or you utilize some simple resources so children are designing their own unit studies.

I recently purchased Study Starters by Westvon Publishing, and it has a lot of great forms to for you and/or your children to use to easily design your own studies. These would be great for student-directed learning, those utilizing notebooking, or a Charlotte Mason approach. They provide a framework for a study and greatly shorten prep time and simplify the unit study approach by providing lots of great forms students can use to record their learning. Virtually any topic your child can dream up to study, there is a form that can be used to record the information he or she learns. There is space for sketches ordrawings. Older children can write down their own thoughts and younger children could dictate or narrate back what they learned. If the information that a younger child dicated was written on scrap paper, the child could then copy their own thoughts onto final paper.

There are forms for topics like: the Arts, Books, Science, Famous People, Performances, Movies, Musicians, Animals, Fish, Religion, Sports, Vehicles, Birds, Dinosaurs, Cities, States, Countries, Holidays, Insects, Inventions, Poetry, Scripture, Crafts, Elements, Machines, Objects, Architecture, Scientists, Music and so much more!

The sheets that your children produce while researching and recording what they learn on the chosen subject can be used for notebooking or even bound into a book. This is a great way to have a lasting record of the children's learning and much better to look back on than a notebook full of completed worksheets!

If you have children who have the same interests, you can do unit studies as a family with children reading books on the same topic at their own reading level. My children have very different interests, so we have not followed this approach very often, but we have picked a broad topic as the main study and each child has focused on their area of interest within the broad topic. As an example, when we went to Scotland, my son loves history so dug into learning more about Scottish history - Bannockburn, Stirling Castle, William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, etc. My daughter loves animals so she was more interested in learning about Greyfriar's Bobby and scottish wildlife.

Amanda Bennett has a lot of prepared unit studies on a large variety of topics. I purchased the Christmas Unit Study this year and was impressed with the content and resources. She also has a ebook called Unit Studies 101 that shows you how to create your own unit studies. I have not used Unit Studies 101, but it does look to have a wealth of information for those looking to create their own unit studies for home education.

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