It’s been a little while but we now have three new units available in the shop.
I am very excited about all of these units. Our plan when creating units, journals and other items is to create things we actually want to use in our homeschool and think others will as well.
For the first 24 hours all of the new products are 50% off, so if you are thinking of purchasing, now is the time because they won’t be this cheap again.
With the arrival of spring just around the corner I wanted to create a resource for us to use as we go about planting and spending more time in our garden.
This Research Journal is perfect for ages 8 and up to learn about gardening and document their process.
This Research Unit is great for ages 6 and up* to learn about ten different fish, including:
lionfish
lake sturgeon
electric eel
whale shark
seahorse
humpback anglerfish
pufferfish
rainbow trout
tiger shark
piranha
Students will use a variety of research materials to fill out this Research Unit Study. Each fish has a page to fill out the resources used and overview of the fish.
* Each lesson involves writing, feel free to let the child dictate and write for them in the longform writing sections.
We tend to be flexible in our homeschool and don’t “do school” five days a week.
Our more laidback homeschool approach means that we are also never really “off”. So while the summers may look a little different, we are still learning.
And this summer we have a couple of different studies we plan on doing.
Okay, here’s a look inside our summer homeschool plans for this year!
Okay guys, I’m excited to finally share our Vikings Unit Study with you!
I’ve been talking about this unit study for the last few weeks in my videos and newsletter and now it’s time to share it.
My original plan for this unit study was just to grab a few good books, some relevant information and random free worksheets from online but Jared took my tiny idea and made it into something awesome!
A FEW DISCLAIMERS
I have a few disclaimers about the unity study before we get started, you can watch the video below or read on for my disclaimers and how to download the unit study.
ONE: We made this unit study specifically for our kids levels and interests so while our son was in grade two and our daughter was in grade five the workbooks are not specifically “grade two level” and “grade five level”.
TWO: We’ve only included the workbooks our kids used and don’t have others for other ages. We do plan on making more unit studies in the future that will include a range of ages.
THREE: I didn’t include an answer key, future unit studies will have them.
FOUR: Feel free to make this unit study work for you, I explained a few different ways on how to do this in the video.
WHAT IT INCLUDES
This unit study includes:
Parent’s Guide
Toddler Coloring Pages
Adventurer Workbook (approximately grade 2)
Explorer Workbook (approximately grade 5)
Each day the workbooks cover:
History
Bible (memory verse)
Math
Language Arts
Some days include additional subjects like art and geography. And the Parent’s Guide includes a number of optional projects.
One of the units I had on my list to study this year was pirates. And since September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day I thought we would learn about them leading up to that day.
We’ve only done a few unit studies so far this year but this one was our favorite one yet.
Pirates are a fun topic to study but it does involve a fair amount of weeding through fact and fiction.
The kids totally got into pirate mode and dressed up in some old Halloween costumes.
There are so many great books, videos and resources for a pirate study, we could have studied the topic all year!
But since there are other topics we want to study it can’t last forever.
Today I want to share some of the resources we used for this study. We actually will continue to learn about it all this week yet so if I come across any more as the week goes by I’ll add them in here.
PIRATE UNIT STUDY RESOURCES
I like to do my own version of strewing* when it comes to our unit studies.
*Not sure what strewing is? It is simply just laying out a number of materials for your children to discover and letting them pick up the ones they find most interesting.
The evening before (or in the morning before the kids are up) I get a lot of our resources out and display them on the table along with a fact related to the topic.
Like this:
Then I see what peaks their interest first.
This time it was the fact that I had displayed:
Pirates actually wore eyepatches.
I explained to each of my kids (separately because they wake up at very different times) that they did not wear an eyepatch because they were missing an eye but I would explain to them later the reasoning behind it.
Well, that piqued their interest!
When it came time for our unit study I explained that pirates actually wore an eyepatch to help with fighting in the dark, like at night or below deck.
Mythbusters even tried this out and found it to be very effective:
Of course, when you happen to have an actual eye patch from the days of correcting your son’s eye muscles, it not only becomes a great addition to a costume, it also helps in testing the theory.
My intention behind strewing with out unit studies is just to lay out a number of different materials on the topic and dive into the ones that interest them the most. I often get resources from the library and just search our house for books and items on the topic.
Boris von der Borch is a mean, greedy old pirate–tough as nails, through and through, like all pirates. Or is he? When a young boy sneaks onto Boris’s ship, he discovers that Boris and his mates aren’t quite what he expected.
Small Saul – another ones of our favorite pirate picture books (also, I love that the French version is Petite Paul).
When Small Saul joins the crew of The Rusty Squid, it doesn’t take long for the other pirates to notice something is very different about this tiny fellow. He was born to sing sea shanties, bake pineapple upside down cakes and redecorate, not to hold a sword and plunder. Being rough and tough just isn’t in his nature.
Pirate Handbook – this was one of our favorite books, we read through most of it, learning about different ways to be a “good” pirate, some of the myths and truths and some information about actual pirates.
This is a humorous guide to life on the high seas packed with intriguing historical detail that no self-respecting sea-dog should leave port without. Young landlubbers can become the fiercest of pirates by finding out how to keep their ship in tip-top shape, the best way to settle an argument with a shipmate and how to survive a storm at sea. It reveals the true nature of piracy to be more fascinating than the myths of peg legs, eye patches and parrots.
Pirates Past Noon – my kids love all things Magic Tree House, this book included!
It’s a treasure trove of trouble! Jack and Annie are in for a high-seas adventure when the Magic Tree House whisks them back to the days of deserted islands, secret maps—and ruthless pirates! Will they discover a buried treasure? Or will they be forced to walk the plank?
Usborne Abridged Treasure Island – I couldn’t find this one to link it but I think it’s a good chapter book for kids to read on their own if they are interested in the book before they are ready for the full thing.
A gorgeously illustrated guide to the history of the world, from wars and revolutions to ground-breaking inventions, discoveries and artistic movements. With over 3,500 key dates from the Stone Age to the year 2000, organised geographically so readers can compare what was happening in different parts of the world.
We also used two of our step-by-step drawing books to draw some piratey pictures. This book and this one are our favorites.
While we used the drawing books a bit the kids also decided to draw some of their own pirate creations as well.
Of course, if you prefer to use a drawing video you can always turn to Art for Kids Hub, this pirate drawing video looks fun.
Of course it was fun to learn that there actually were some women pirates as well since the only ones I had heard about previously were men, here’s some information on two real-life pirates you’ve probably never heard of.
Fellow homeschool mom and blogger Monique Willms recommended we listen to Lives of the Pirates which our library has on audio, it includes short stories on actual pirates. We’re a few stories in and enjoying it.
There really was so much more we could have learned about pirates but for a short less-than-a-week study I think we did pretty good!
We’re actually going to continue studying pirates for the next couple of days so I may add a few more resources to this post if we find some good ones!
Have some great pirate resources to share? Leave them in the comments below!
I actually gave the kids the option between butterflies and weather and this is what they both chose. I was actually surprised by that choice.
Weather is a broad topic and we definitely didn’t cover everything in one afternoon but we learned some stuff we didn’t know and that’s kind of the goal here. Little bits of learning all add up!
I gathered all the books I had from the library on weather as well as ones we had around the house and we picked a few to look through and read.
I created a list of weather books a couple of months ago, many of which we used for this little unit study.
A couple more books we used that aren’t on that list are:
Usborne Weather (in an edition so old I can’t even find a link for it)
The weather fact I put up on the letter board was:
Wind doesn’t make a sound until it blows against an object.
One of my children gets very frightened by the sound of wind and when they heard this fact they decided wind really wasn’t that scary then. #scienceforthewin
I remembered making a tornado in a bottle in elementary school and it was something I wanted to do with the kids. The one I remembered involved two large pop bottles and a piece of plastic, but honestly, the little plastic piece was $5 and I didn’t want to have to order it and wait for it to come in so we just made a mini tornado with a water bottle, water and glitter. It wasn’t as impressive but it worked.
Here’s the one I originally wanted to make:
Here’s what we made instead:
We also watched a couple of educational videos about weather from some of our favorite kids science YouTube channels:
And that’s really all there was to our mini unit study on weather!
If we would have taken more time/had the kids shown more interest in the topic I would have printed out the Clouds Fact Cards that we have from Brave Grown Home that we got in a previous bundle, maybe we’ll do that if/when we study the topic in the future.
If you have suggestions on other topics we should study in the future, I would love to hear them, I’m currently keeping a running list of ideas!
