How Eclectic Homeschoolers Fall in Love with Unit Studies
When I started homeschooling my children nine years ago I didn’t have a budget set aside for curriculum, so I started making my own. I gathered information from various sources online, trolled my local library for related books, and began to create entire lessons centered around the topic of my choosing. When friends would ask the type of homeschoolers we were, I would reply that we were “more eclectic”. It wasn’t until I attended a class years later that I discovered that what I was doing was actually making my own unit studies. Can you imagine sitting in a room ready to learn about “notebooking” and “unit studies” and realizing that you had been doing just that all along? Yes. That was me. I felt so silly.
What’s great about Unit Studies is that parents with children of different ages can all work on the same topic of study at the same time. Instead of having five kids on five completely different tasks, everyone is learning together. That means the older children can assist the younger ones, and the little kids can feel as important as the big kids when everyone discusses the lessons together.
Learn about the latest unit study we are working from, below.
Presidents of the United States, Video-Based Unit Study Review
During the fall much of our lessons are centered around the holidays, but when the new year rolls out, we love to branch out into different studies. This year, we are all working on the Presidents of the United States. Paradise Praises has a Video-Based Unit Study that has everything I need in one place. YouTube videos, book lists, vocabulary, and printable resources are all there. It’s a nine week study that takes us through ALL of the presidents, and even the first ladies! (See the example page below for Day 1’s lesson.)
In this engaging 9-week (45 lesson) Presidential video-based unit study, you will travel through 230 years of US history as seen through the eyes of the men who’ve led our country, and those who knew them well! Not all of our children learn from reading, so we’ve based this study on short engaging video clips and compiled our unit study around them.
Adaptable for Kindergarten through high school, this reproducible guide provides study resources that are appropriate to use with one child or with several of different ages, giving them a virtual and audio biography snapshot of the men who’ve shaped our country.
Presidents from George Washington to Donald Trump are mentioned along with their vice presidents. 77 pages.
I love that the Presidents of the United States, Video-Based Unit Study is so similar to a unit study I would make myself for my own children — except, I’m not the one who had to spend weeks sorting through websites and typing up daily lessons! They thought of everything and pulled from the best websites online. The videos are just the starting point. If you take advantage of all of the free resources listed, your children’s President’s notebook will be full, your walls will be adorned with Presidential quality artwork, US Maps full of pinpoints, and their timelines will be greatly detailed. At the end of this study, your children will know how important each President was to building the country we live in today.
President’s Day is February 19th!
Grab your copy HERE so you can begin your unit study before President’s Day!
This is good. I will tell my niece about it. She home schools her daughter.
A neat way to learn
That’s interesting. Homeschooling sounds like a full time job!