So you’re here on the website and you’re thinking… Well I like the sound of homeschool and budget, but what the heck is a unit study?
Well folks, I’m here to tell you the best and simplest way to home school multiple ages, and it’s – you guessed it – unit studies.
At my house I have tons of projects going on at any given minute. My husband and I run a couple of online businesses and multiple side hustles. Playing school with my kids all day sounds glorious, but not realistic. We needed to have a streamlined way for them to learn, with the option of the girls to delve deeper into a topic independently if they wanted to – a unit study accomplishes this.
We start with a topic, for example, birds. This topic may stay for a week or two – or even 3 or 4 if the interest holds. You will know when your kids are over learning about the same topic. So we tie into the topic of birds as many subjects as possible. We may count birds with my kindergartner and graph them with my 2nd grader. We may make artsy birds nests, do science experiments with eggs, and watch a documentary about how birds use their beaks (this one is on Netflix – beak & brain – it’s my second grader’s favorite documentary).
This is the idea behind a unit study. You spend as much time as you’d like on a topic, go in as deep as you like, and try and cover multiple subjects. Are you always going to be able to cover each subject? No. Let’s face it sometimes history just doesn’t tie in with math on a topic such as bugs or birds. But you’d be surprised how much can be tied in. Sometimes the unit study is all you need, and you can forgo your LA or math curriculum for the week.
You can do a unit study on the fly by just going to the library, or you can make your own, or you can buy them in full from other people to cut time on your planning! However you do it, more power to you! In my opinion this is the most efficient and totally fun way to school multiple age kids.
Peruse the site for my freebies and low cost unit studies!
-Em