Starting Smart So You Can Finish Strong

One thing I have learned from experience is that the enthusiasm you have at the beginning of the school year is barely holding its head above water by the time you get past the winter holidays and, as you enter February, ‘enthusiasm’ has died and you are in survival mode until the first signs of spring show up. There are several ways to combat this; co-ops, scheduled classes outside the home, memberships to various educational platforms. But one of the things that I think is a big help in keeping the positive attitude alive during the longest stretches of winter is having a Unit Study. 

Unit Studies can last a month, a semester, or a whole year and they serve to give you a purpose and a goal in your teaching - they are, if you will, a skeleton that holds up, and holds together, everything! Let me give you an example to illustrate:

My family lived in Maine for a few years and the winters there are long and dark. I love the snow, and don’t mind the cold, but even I was over it when we were still having blizzards in March. During this time our homeschooling family chose to divide our year into semesters and make our unit studies appropriate for the season at hand. During the fall semester we did a study centered on lighthouses . We trekked all over the state visiting the wide variety of specimens available. For English classes we would read books, and write reports, about lighthouses. For history we would visit lighthouses that still operated in the same way they did two-hundred years ago, without running water or electricity. For social studies we learned about the fishing and lobster industry (that relied heavily on those lighthouses). 

When the winter semester started and we couldn’t travel about as easily we started a unit study on weather. The library was filled with books on air patterns and low pressure systems. We organized a group of local families and invited the T.V. weatherman to come teach us about how he predicted what would happen. That winter, Maine was struck with a brutal ice-storm that knocked out the power for two weeks solid, so we learned about ice storms. We took advantage of the natural phenomenon to learn science! With everything covered in six inches of ice, we lived like pioneers and that was a learning experience too!

By the time spring rolled around and the ice started to melt we were ready to move on to our next unit study. Years start to blur together in my memory so I don’t know if we studied art that spring or did a dive into a history unit (drawing, perhaps, on our pioneer winter experience). Although the units are jumbled in my mind now they served to keep us organized then. They helped us keep going when we needed to. Knowing what you are supposed to be working on always helps you stay focused. 

A unit study can be built around almost anything. It can be a point in history, a culture, a person, an object, a subject of any kind! If you decided on a geography unit or a United States unit, The Adventure Letters would be a wonderful asset to help in that study! The Adventure Letters would even be useful in a unit that focuses on communication, letters, or the mail system! I would love to hear what kind of units you are considering for your new year of school! Sharing your plans can help others in your homeschool community who may be having a hard time coming up with ideas, and I would be happy to post some of the things you come up with!