Education :: Studying the 13 Colonies

 

I started homeschooling my first grader this year and I heard a lot of good things about unit studies. A unit study is picking a topic and including lessons or activities that span multiple subject areas. I researched a few different styles and ended up plotting my own unit study path. You can download my checklist below:

Unit Study Development Checklist PDF

 

Filling out the Checklist

I use the checklist as a guide – it isn’t necessarily the definitive course, but it helps me plan and, if something else comes up, I’ll add it in. Here’s what my list looks like for the 13 Colonies Unit Study:

Topic of Interest: 13 Colonies

Subcategories: Colonies, colonial jobs, colonial kids/games, around the house, famous people, colonial food

Book List:

• Your Travel Guide to Colonial America by Nancy Day (Runestone Press)
• Science in Colonial America by Brendan January (Grolier Publishing)
• Brown Paper School USKids History: Book of the American Colonies by Howard Egger-Bovet and Marlene Smith Barabzini (Little, Brown and Company)
• Life in the American Colonies by Ruth Dean and Melissa Thomson (Lucent Books)
• Projects About Colonial Life by Marian Broida (Benchmark Books)

Math Activities: General Math; cooking project (Shrewsbury Cakes from Projects about Colonial Life); Money: Pieces of Eight (from Projects about Colonial Life)

Language Arts/English Activities: Reading; Notebooking pages (you can find my notebooking pages here); colonial words; All About Spelling (aff) (All about Spelling is a great program that we use. Read my dandelion moms post about it here.)

History Activities: reading

Science Projects: Making soap

Art Projects: Study of John Singleton Copely, famous colonial artist; paint a self portrait

Games/Physical Activity: Colonial Olympics – practice a series of games/activities kids participated in during colonial times (i.e. leap frog, hoop rolling, hopscotch, marbles, tag, bowling)

Field Trips: Heritage Museum of Orange County

Movies/Videos: Colonial Life for Children: Settling the New World (Schlessinger Media)

Gathering Materials

The books and the video I got at the library so there was no out of pocket cost here. As for the other activities, I simply purchased supplies as needed. To make soap, I purchased a soap making kit from the craft store. We had the supplies for the art project on hand, and the ingredients for the shrewsbury cakes were already in our kitchen. We haven’t done the pieces of eight yet, but I’m contemplating trying it with play-doh since we’ve already got it. However, I’ve used sculpey before (the recommended material) and I know it is more user-friendly, so I may end up purchasing a small package that might run me a grand total of $4.

Getting Into It

My son loves reading, but he doesn’t enjoy spending a lot of time writing. Also, I don’t feel like I’m truly educating him if I simply ask him to read and then fill out a series of questions and answers or workbook pages. We do that, it’s just not our main educational element. Instead, we like to get into the subject, recreate the era in our own way so we truly learn what it’s like to be part of that time. The fun thing about trying to live it is that it also brings more questions to the surface, giving us a chance to explore things we may not have covered had we just done the reading and writing.

Unit studies are great tools for homeschool, but they are also excellent ways to explore topics of interest with your kids in your free time. So your child goes to traditional school but loves presidents – pick a president and spend a weekend doing a mini-unit study with your kids about who he was, what it was like during his lifetime, reading books about it, etc. The most important thing is that you have fun while encouraging your children to learn more about what interests them!

Would you like more information on lessons or educational materials? Visit my website www.bookwormhomeschool.com for regular updates on what we’re doing and reading. I’ll also be adding more notebooking pages to my Teachers Pay Teachers profile soon, so if you’d like more of those, you can find me at https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Bookworm-Homeschool.

 

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