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Unit studies are especially beneficial if you are teaching more then one child. If you are teaching three children each seven different subjects using textbooks and workbooks – that’s a WHOPPING twenty one subjects to prepare and teach.

A family with three children using textbook methods might have one child study the Civil War another learning about Ancient Rome while another is studying the American Revolution in history. In Science one child may be studying plants, another the planets and another reptiles.

In Bible, one child may be studying Moses, another studying Joseph and another studying Paul. With unit studies, history, geography, art, music, science and Bible can all be taught together to all ages. Each child studies the topic at his level.

All children can go on field trips together, many projects can be done together, writing assignments vocabulary words will be about the same topic, just on different levels.

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 learns and helps to teach the younger while the younger learns from the older child.

Delight Directed: Planning

Delight-directed learning, with a set plan like Heart of Wisdom unit studies, begins by allowing children to be a part of the planning process. During the planning phase, allow the student to participate in choosing the resources for that unit (fiction novel, colorful reference book, video, Internet site, interactive multimedia, etc.). It’s very possible that a child might balk at the unit as a whole but later find a spark in one of the individual lessons.

To continue with the food analogy, a child might, say, groan over something he sees cooking, but after a taste, finds it pleasing to his palate.

Teaching Multi-Ages:  Sample Day

Mother is teaching Jenny (fifteen), John (thirteen), and Joseph (ten) a unit on the Middle Ages.

During the unit planning the three decide together on the resources. They look through the resources at Homeschool-Books.com or in the back of The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach book at the Middle Ages Resources. The three choose Kingfisher Illustrated Encyclopedia, and Eyewitness Medieval Life from their home library. Mother orders a novel,The Door in the Wall (from the library or a vendor) to read aloud during the unit.

While reviewing the lessons the children show the most interest in knights, castles, and medieval feasts. Before the unit begins they will pick up books on these topics from the library. Several opportunities will occur during the steps in each lesson to bring into play the delight-directed methods. Let’s look at an example of how each of the three children might discover their own level of interest in the lesson on knights.

The sample below is a lesson based on Heart of Wisdom teaching methods (combination of organized 4-Step unit study, Charlotte Mason approach, teaching to all learning styles).

Unit: Middle Ages. Lesson: Knights

In Step One (Excite), Mother is watching each student for a spark.  Step One activities evoke feedback which shows how interested each child is in the topic and suggests the possible duration of the lesson. As they brainstorm to make lists,John and Joshua both show an intense interest in this topic.

In Step Two, Mother reads the provided text in the unit, and then turns to the resources chosen during the unit planning phase. She reads aloud from the suggested pages in the Kingfisher Illustrated Encyclopedia and Eyewitness Medieval Life. John and Joseph spend time reading through the suggested web sites and library resources,and print out several illustrations of a knight’s armor and weapons.  Jenny also browses the Internet sites and chooses an image of a knight to add to her portfolio,but she leaves the boys to explore the sites as she moves on to Step Three assignments.

In Step Three, Mother allows each child to choose an activity:

• John (13) chooses to complete a writing assignment. Mother encourages this assignment because he needs more writing practice and he enjoys this topic. John writes a separate draft paragraph for each of several topics: tournaments, jousting, suits of armor, crossbows, and the Crusades. He searches or uses the Internet to find illustrations for each summary.

• Joseph (10) chooses to create a shield with a coat of arms. He uses colored pencils to design a coat of arms similar to those he viewed from the resources. He the makes the shield from cardboard and pastes or glues the coat of arms onto the shield.

• Jenny is not as interested in this topic so she copies a paragraph from Eyewitness Medieval Life and moves on to a math lesson (more about Jenny later).

In Step Four, the students choose how they will share their work.

• During this step,Mother and John are busy revising and correcting John’s drafts .After the corrections John glues illustrations to the summary pages and includes them in his portfolio. He chooses to add more on this topic to his portfolio and shares it with his grandparents.
• Joseph shows his shield to his father and explains his coat of arms.
• Jenny adds her writing and illustrations to her portfolio and shares the work with her brothers.

In this example, all three children have learned about knights. John has obviously learned the most. We know all three have learned significantly more than they would in a typical school where the children would read perhaps one boring paragraph about knights.

John and Joseph will continue on this topic in the coming weeks by choosing a novel and/or illustrated reference books from the library on knights ,or by learning more from the Internet. Their wise mother will continue to fan the flame as long as the fire burns (weeks or months). If no spark had appeared during this lesson, the amount of time spent on this lesson would have been dramatically different.

Jenny did not do a lot with the lesson on knights because she did not have a spark of interest. Later, however, Jenny’s spark shows up in the “Food in the Middle Ages” lesson. She ends up spending several hours researching and planning an authentic medieval feast for her family. She designs an elaborate menu for her portfolio and reads the library book Medieval Feasts to Joshua.

Four-Steps Summary

1. During Step One, look for the spark.
2. In Step Two, the spark will be your signal to encourage your student(s) to go on to more resources. If the lesson ignites a spark for one child and not another (which will probably be the case) don’t force all the students into spending time on further study. Take a trip to the library, or order books, or allow computer time for Internet search.
3. In Step Three, allow each child to choose the activity in which to do something with what he or she just learned. This could be anything from simple copy work or an involved project.
4. In Step Four, allow each child to choose how to share the material.

Teaching is much more than providing facts — real teaching means causing to learn. The delight-directed methods work when we provide opportunities for meaningful experiences,and then wait and watch for moments when children’s eyes light up. Then they’re off and running, determined and motivated to learn!

Many homeschoolers enjoy the benefits of using dynamic unit studies to maintain a high interest level in their course of study.   Here are the common types of unit studies you may wish to consider.

Integrated Unit Studies

Integrated unit studies organize the content of multiple subjects (such as English, Science, Social Studies) around one theme.  For instance, if the unit was “Russia”, the study might include stories from Russia (Reading), Animals in Siberia (science), Geography of Russia, history of the Cold War (Social Studies).  Multiple academic subjects can be pursued with this type of study: art, music, dance, theology, philosophy, poetry, etc.   It takes multiple resources and either a lot of planning or the purchase of a curriculum that includes the different resources.

Literature Based Unit Studies

This type of homeschool unit study is great for children and families who love books.  Often the unit is developed around a historical period or around a theme.  Quality books and classical literature are read throughout the unit.  Families using this type of unit study often construct time lines to display the big picture.

Hands-On Unit Studies

Hands on unit studies provide students with plenty of hands on projects.  This is great the kinesthetic learners or young learners particularly.  They can build models, write poems, create posters, and develop games and puzzles to reflect what they have learned.  The completion of their unit study often includes a scrap book or unit study book which reflects their projects.

Learning Tree Unit Studies

This unit study uses a tree as its model.  The student diagrams a tree with its roots as the resources used to study the topic (the trunk of the tree).  The branches are the main objectives to be accomplished.  The leaves are the books read; and the fruit are projects completed.  Before the unit starts, parents set a minimum number of resources and projects that the student must complete.  They are rewarded for doing more work than the minimum.

Interest Focused Unit Studies

This is a method of motivating a particular student in their study of difficult subjects by allowing them to focus on a favorite topic.  For example, you have a student who struggles with reading and writing but is fascinated by dinosaurs.  What kind of books do you want to get from the library?  As you introduce any topic: geography, writing, science – tie it to dinosaurs.  Students will be more interested in completing the writing assignments, learning geography, or studying the digestive system if it is tied to their interest.  A topic of interest is often studied anywhere between 3 and 9 months.

Advanced Unit Studies

The advanced unit study takes the interest focused unit study to a deeper level.  If a student has a long term interest in a particular topic, they can combine that topic with another topic to produce an in-depth study.  For instance, a student who continued a fascination of ballet for years, might do a study on dance during the Renaissance, including costumes and music for different periods and nations.  This type of unit study takes a lot of time and energy to pursue, but is a great way to culminate a long-term interest.

The available definitions for Eclectic Homeschooling are as wide and varied as the possibilities it provides.  Many non-homeschoolers imagine homeschooling to be very similar in structure to public schooling, although at home.  They assume that homeschooled students sit at a desk all day, working their way through a set curriculum, as well as completing assignments and exams.  Indeed, this is the way that some families choose to homeschool, and it can work very well.

Eclectic homeschooling, however, involves utilizing resources and information from anywhere and everywhere.  Rather than be restricted to one set curriculum, they may utilize a variety of text books.  But, eclectic homeschooling certainly doesn’t stop there. Eclectic homeschooling also includes using a variety of methods, tools and even locations, to educate your children, as well as letting their needs and desires determine what is taught and how. Many parents of special needs children homeschool their children in an eclectic fashion.

Eclectic homeschooling is a form of homeschooling that is simply bursting with potential, because your family’s educational journey is only limited by your imagination… and, perhaps, funding.  Many parents will take a child interests and turn it into a fun school subject or use a variety of books to teach literature instead of buying a program or a boring anthology of works. Eclectic homeschooling families are often very talented at discovering what works. While some parents will buy a curriculum and persevere, following it to the letter, even if their kids are struggling, this should never be the case in homeschooling. Don’t be afraid to change!  If the kids are struggling, and there is little progress, maybe its time to look into another way to doing things.  This is where eclectic homeschooling really comes into its own.  If it’s broke, definitely fix it.  It’s your kids and their future, and they are the reason we are homeshooling in the first place!

Unschooling

Somewhat closely associated to Eclectic Homeschooling is the concept of unschooling.  This method of education takes advantage of the fact that children are natural learners.  Instead of setting a rigid structure, unschoolers allow their children’s interests to direct their education, with the parents, as homeschool teachers, acting as facilitators of the learning process, rather than directors/writers/dictators.

Unschooling can be surprisingly effective when well-guided, allowing the child to maintain an interest and some influence over his/her own learning materials, utilizing real life activities, as well of books and standard resources.  Orthodox unschoolers believe that learners self-determine what is important to know in the world and, as there is more to learn than can ever be learned, the skills learned in self-directed learning will keep students in good stead throughout life.  Also, they argue that there is no such thing as particular topics of study being critical to know, or more important than other subjects in the grand scheme of things.  Therefore, whatever direction of study the student chooses is the right one for them.  Critics of unschooling, however, express concern that unschoolers may avoid topics that are not of interest, and may therefore be lacking in particular aspects of education and/or social skills, including those deemed important for the workforce.

Regardless of the style of homeschooling adopted long-term, many homeschooling families make good use of unschooling as a transition from government schooling to homeschooling, allowing the child to create new educational associations, and slip into the new freedoms that homeschooling allows.

The Smithsonian Institution’s recipe for genius and leadership:

1. Children should spend a great deal of time with loving, educationally minded parents;
2. Children should be allowed a lot of free exploration; and
3. Children should have little to no association with peers outside of family and relatives. –H. McCurdy

My husband and I have no qualms about our style of parenting, which is so tied up in home education. He grew up beside his father in a greenhouse. Our first apartment at 500 sq ft, had 31 houseplants in it. He now works as a landscape designer. So we understand this analogy: Children are like little plants. You take the seed and put it in a little cup of the best topsoil. You give it lots of light. You gently sprinkle it with drops of water so the delicate leaves aren’t broken. When it gets a decent root system, you transplant it to a bigger pot. You protect it from the wind and the hottest sun. You bring it in when there’s a freeze. You don’t put it out where the dog will trample it or a deer will eat the buds. When its well-established, and the season is right, you can transplant it finally to its place outside your home. Then it will do well on its own in the downpours and coldest winters.

So we plan to raise our children, protecting them and ensuring they are firmly established before they go out into the world. It is our hope that they do much better at surviving their relationships and careers with such a secure beginning. Our family follows the Classical Education model. I use the book, “The Well-Trained Mind” as the base for our curriculum. The basic premise of the classical method is the breakdown of education into three sections which each build on each other. First is the Grammar stage, generally 1st-4th grades, in which a child’s curiosity is encouraged by just stuffing them full of images and facts. The next stage is the Logic stage, generally 5th- 8th grades, where an adolescent begins to find the answers to the how and why of what they learned in the Grammar stage. Last is the Rhetoric stage, in which 9th -12th graders learn how to coherently express what they have learned. In Classical Education, all learning follows history as its base and the other subjects work around it. In addition, a student goes over the same material three times in his education (cycling through the material once in each stage).

An example of this is our reading material. Ideally, it should be exciting to entrance and interest the first grader, in-depth for the questioning fifth grader, and even more interesting and in depth for the ninth grader. In our home, I buy books on a fifth grade level to read to our first grader, and when we cycle back to the same material in the fifth grade, they read it for themselves, and in ninth grade they read source material. For example, I read The Trojan War and the 12 Labors of Hercules to my first grader. All of my children were enthralled. There were no pictures except those that streamed through their imaginations. Then, when we return to ancient history in the fifth grade, she will curl up on the couch and read about Hercules on her own. This time she’ll learn that mom edited out the reason why he was assigned the 12 tasks: he killed his wife and children in a drunken rage. Then, when she returns again to the ancients in the ninth grade, she won’t be intimidated by reading Homer’s Illiad itself in the poetic original version. What’s to be afraid of, when you’re already familiar with the times and places? Also, when she was taught astronomy in the second grade, she already knew the story behind the crab-shaped constellation, from last year when she saw Hercules toss him into the sky in her mind’s eye.

I was looking at a book from a series aimed at second-graders, called Junie B. Jones. It is listed on reading lists for this age group- yet it has sentences starting with conjunctions and fragments on every page. It has adjectives like bestest. It frequently says me and her. On a whim I looked up classical literature for this age group. I found rough breakdowns of classical literature by grade level. One example was The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. The first five sentences in The Velveteen Rabbit had an average of 29.2 words in each sentence. The first five sentences of Junie B. Jones and her Big Fat Mouth had an average of 5.4 words per sentence.

An example of one of the more complex sentences which I found in JBJ & her Big Fat Mouth was “Eating things that you find on the ground is very, very dangerous.” I gave it another try and found “That’s because I had tingling excitement in me about Job Day.” In addition to using more complex sentence structure, Williams does not pare down her vocabulary to meet the child reader. Look how this sentence from The Velveteen Rabbit teaches the meaning of the word superior: “The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real.” JBJ is so full of incorrect grammar and simple sentences because it is written from the point of view of a modern first-grader, who would actually speak like that (unfortunately) and have simple interactions. However, there are quite a few older books, written in a different time, from the point of view of a five-year-old (Heidi, Little House series). They are also more complex and descriptive and are much preferred to modern books written for our young people.

Another difference found in the Classical Education model is the emphasis of the use of whole books instead of readers. In public schools today, segments of books are printed in textbooks with summary questions at the end. The publisher chops the most exciting or pertinent portions of a work out, puts it in the textbook, and asks directed questions which can be answered by that portion. Then we wonder later why kids can’t dig through a whole book and find themes when it is not spelled out to them!

I encourage you to challenge your child’s reading level by not feeding them Goosebumps or Sweet Valley High, Babysitter’s Club, or such books. Yes, your child is reading, but she is not really being challenged when she only reads about familiar locales in familiar phrasing. Always read what is a little difficult, not playground conversation in written form. When I was in middle school I really enjoyed the Sackett series by Louis L’Amour. A few of them are written from the point of view of a young girl. They give excellent images of early backwoods Eastern America. They encourage determination, hard work, overcoming obstacles, honesty, trustworthiness, gumption, and a host of other excellent qualities.

Those are virtues I would hope that any parent would like to see cultivated in their child. But because educating at home is solely the responsibility of the parents, these are especially crucial. As homeschoolers, we have great freedom to:

• Do our schoolwork wherever we want
• Wear whatever we want
• Go at whatever pace we choose
• Drop work we already know
• Spend extra time on topics we love
• Do our work whenever we want
• Take breaks or work through

but these freedoms give us responsibilities that families with children in regular schools don’t carry. They aren’t held accountable for what is (or isn’t) learned. They don’t have to be personally disciplined to cover the material or lessons themselves. They have an outside authority taking care of all that, who will be held accountable in a public forum. As home educators, we have to force ourselves take care of the objectives. We meet the goals which we set for ourselves, or we don’t. No one else will come in and check on us. We have to be responsible for our own education, and that means getting the work done and then doing the playing. So traits like persistence, responsibility, determination, honesty and the ability to do hard work are instilled in each work day, as much as math, science, history or English skills are. Unlike those who defer the education of their children to others, we are able and willing to drop the spelling lesson and address the poor attitude. We can put the multiplication drills on hold until the whining is under control. We can give time to grieve a lost grandparent before expecting academic performance to continue on uninterrupted. There are many, many reasons why we have chosen to educate our children at home. These are just a few.