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Why Use Unit Studies in Your Homeschool

We are digging into unit studies more. I have been intrigued for a long time as anything that makes homeschooling multiple kids easier is my favorite thing. I’m going to help make homeschooling your kids easier.

kids looking at a project together with text overlay

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Why Use Unit Studies in Your Homeschool

Unit studies are an all-encompassing, focused approach that uses resources from all areas of a curriculum whenever possible, and provides an in-depth learning experience. 

Often unit studies start with a core resource book, then dig into extra books, include hands-on activities where possible, and expand through many subjects such as language, history, geography, etc.

Each child studies the topic at his or her own level letting everyone learn together.

Learning Together with Unit Studies

Unit studies for homeschooling are especially beneficial if you are teaching more than one child. If you are using textbooks and workbooks to teach three children seven different subjects each, that’s a lot of subjects to prepare and teach. Not to mention buying and hard on a homeschool budget.

For example, while studying animals, a younger child may be able to classify birds, mammals, and insects, while an older child would classify animals in much more detail, such as arachnids, crustaceans, etc. The older child learns and helps to teach the younger while the younger learns from the older.

Unit studies work well for children with different learning styles. Most unit studies give several options to learn about a topic.

parent using unit studies multiple children with text overlay

Unit Study Disadvantages

  • Can be a lot of planning and prep work for the parent
  • It has the potential to be quite messy from the hands-on activities
  • If your family has different age ranges, older children can feel like they are being held back in group learning times
  • Might need to supplement unit study with additional content for other subjects like math

For example, a unit study about animals would include:

  • reading stories such as Charlotte’s Web (literature)
  • writing stories about animals (creative writing, capitalization, punctuation, etc.)
  • learning about the classification of animals (science)
  • learning new words such as vertebrate and invertebrate (vocabulary)
  • finding out which animals live on which continents (geography)
  • examining man’s relationship with animals throughout history (history)

I am looking forward to learning with unit studies alongside my children. Unit studies we do now can be reused in the future

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