6 Ways To Adapt Unit Studies For Your Homeschool

Unit studies are a great way to learn in your homeschool! They allow you to pick a topic that is interesting to your children. When children are interested in a topic, they learn a lot more!

Unit studies can often be used with the whole family. Learning as a family is fun, and it cuts down on the number of lessons you need to teach or oversee.

And, unit studies allow you to make connections between different subjects and to the real world while you learn. This creates more pathways in the brain and greater retention of information.

Adapting Unit Studies For Your Homeschool

But sometimes it is hard to know how to make them work for your family. It might seem like there are too many activities in the unit study, or maybe some won’t work for your kids. Maybe you have kids working at different levels, and you are not sure how to include all of them in the same unit study.

Here are six ways to adapt unit studies and make them work for your whole family.

Identify the Core Materials

Unit studies for homeschoolers will always have a few activities that you will need to complete for the unit study to make any sense. These are often books, but they might also be a movie, some type of lesson that you teach, a science experiment, or another type of hands-on project.

The first step in looking at a new unit study for your family is to identify which activities and materials are the core materials, and then decide if those will work for your children.

Will these core materials interest your children? If it is a book or movie, will it engage your children, or will they find it too dry or boring? If it is a lesson you will teach, ask yourself if your kids usually enjoy those types of lessons. Do they go well or does everyone end up frustrated? If it is a hands-on activity, will your children enjoy it? Or does it involve touching or doing things that they will not tolerate?

Will you be able to use the core activities in a way that matches your kids’ skill levels? Below I give you lots of ideas for how to adapt materials to make them work for your children’s skill levels, but there are going to be times when a unit study just needs to be set aside until your kids are older.

Will YOU be able to easily implement them? Don’t forget this last question! Many activities look great, but then we realize we need a lot of materials for them. Or they will take more time or clean up than we are willing to dedicate.

Once you have identified the core materials and determined that yes, they will work for your family, it is time to move on to the next stop.

Choose Some Optional Activities

Unit studies for homeschoolers often include lots of different activities. They might not call them optional, but if they are not the core materials and activities you identified above, then you can consider them optional! You are the leader of your homeschool, and you can choose what to do for your kids.

So, look over the other activities in the unit study and ask yourself the questions above. Will they interest your children? Will they match your kids’ skill levels? Will you be able to easily implement them?

And then ask yourself one more question…will the activity enhance what you are learning in the unit study? If you answer yes to all four questions, then that is an activity you should include!

Make a Schedule

There are several ways to include a unit study in your homeschool schedule.

If it is a science-based study, and you already have a time in your schedule blocked off for science, the study can slide right in there. Same for any other subject.

If that doesn’t work, then maybe the unit study is something you do to start your day before other activities or end your day when other work is done.

You could also set aside one day each week to do unit studies. Here is how you can incorporate a Fun Friday into your homeschool to work on unit studies. But it doesn’t have to be a Friday…any day will do!

Different Ways to Read Books

Now back to how to adapt the materials in the unit study to work for your kids’ skill levels. Let’s start with books.

If you have multiple kids that will be doing the unit study with you, then the easiest way to read books in a unit study is to read them as a read aloud. Read alouds have so many benefits, no matter the age of your children. Yes, even high schoolers benefit from read alouds!

And don’t worry if the book is above or below your child’s reading level. If there is valuable information in it for them to learn, then it is worth reading. And if they might not understand everything, that is ok. Some of the story line or information will stick with them.

If you want your children to read the books independently, I suggest you also read them so that you can have meaningful discussions about the book with them. (You may need to borrow or purchase multiple copies of the book to make this work.)

You could even read ahead of your child and put sticky notes in their book to help them follow the story. The sticky notes could point out important parts of the book, contain vocabulary words they might not know with the definitions, or ask them questions to help them remember information for discussing the chapter afterward.

Adapt Writing Assignments For Your Children

Many unit studies have some type of writing involved in them. This writing might be an essay, but it also could be written answers to questions or short pieces of writing within some type of optional activity.

And writing can be hard for kids. Writing requires kids to use many different skills, so the writing assignments within unit studies might be where you need to adapt the most.

There are many ways to do this. If your kids need a high level of support with writing, have them tell you what they want to write, and you can write it down for them. This is known as dictation. You may stop there, or you may have your child then copy what you wrote on to their paper.

You can also decide what level of writing you expect from your child during the unit study. Remember, you are the leader of your homeschool. If there are questions in a unit study that require a written answer, you may decide if the expectation is for your child to just write a few words to answer the question. Or if you would like them to answer in a full sentence with correct spelling, grammar, capitalization and punctuation. Tailor your expectations to the writing skills your child is currently working on. Each child might have a different expectation throughout the unit study.

And if there is a full essay in the unit study that you want to tackle, help your child brainstorm thoughts ahead of time. Help them create an outline before they start writing. This might involve the two of you talking and you writing the outline for them. Then, your children can follow the outline as they write.

Model Challenging Activities

There might be other types of activities in the unit study that you want to do in your homeschool, but you know are too challenging for your children to complete themselves. Of course, you can always help them complete these activities at whatever level of support they need.

But remember, you can also model how to complete the activity. This means you complete the activity yourself and talk about what you are doing as you do it.

Let’s pretend the activity is to draw a cell, and you know that it will be too hard for your child to draw a complete cell with all its parts and label them. Give them whatever materials they need to do the activity and tell them to do their best and that you are going to do the activity, too.

Then draw the cell yourself and talk about how you are making each part and how you are labeling it. This might be up on a piece of paper taped to the wall like a lesson. Or it could just be next to your child like you are just another student who likes to talk to herself! Go with whatever method you think will be the most enjoyable for you and your children.

You can find many unit studies for homeschoolers through a Google search or through Facebook groups. And now you have a step-by-step process to make them work for YOUR family!

By Randi Smith from Peanut Butter Fish Lessons | Unit Studies for Homeschoolers & More