Yup such nice handwriting I have there...don't ya think?
Insanity that known as the homeschooling mom. Well here we are gearing into week 8 and yes I am well aware that says week 10 in the photo. I had come to the issue of that we weren't learning no where I thought we were in science.
Dear Son is in love with magic school but once the video and scholastic worksheets were done we had anywhere from 2-3 days open. I was tired of going to the next video and knew I needed to fix it and fast! That's where unit studies come in.
Unit study= "Unit studies, sometimes called thematic units or integrated studies, are very popular with homeschoolers. Unit studies usually use a hands-on approach for effective learning. The child learns by actually experiencing or discovering through different methods and activities, rather than just reading a chapter from a textbook. Studies show that children using unit-study methods retain 45% more than those using a traditional approach."
Now with said and done... I have done science and broke it down with projects and activities. Next week we are learning about the rainforest. So things that we are going to get into are what types of animals live there, where are rain forests located, what types of plants can be found, are their indigenous peoples that live there and so on. Some topics that we cover have mini books that I printed off and lapbooks to go with them.
As you can see the color the Coral Reef is a lapbook with tons of information about sea life, the ecology, biology and more. I have combined the subjects of ELA (English, Language Arts), Science and arts and crafts. Everything blends with each other. I also have a print out for DS to do a report on an animal for each topic that we have science.
It expands on what we are learning in science, but unit studies can be use for any subject really. There are tons of resources that are free, you just gotta know where it look or how to Google them.
It's taken me 3 days to figure out how I wanted to do this and keep DS attention with science as well as expand our topic so he is actually learning more than what Mrs. Frizzle can teach in a 20 min. YouTube video.