Homeschool Memoirs: Unit Studies

I suppose if I really admitted it (and fully realized it) - which I didn't until now, our entire school year so far has been a giant unit study of sorts. You'd think I'd catch on a little quicker, eh? We've been studying different countries around the world, but all with the purpose of learning more about our world as a whole.

Contained in little pockets of our study are smaller pockets of study...it's amazing to me how one unit can contain other sub-units...and sometimes you can really get carried away. For example, we are studying world geography and as we studied Japan we also studied volcanoes and had a week-long adventure doing that. When we studied China we added in a unit on pandas. We've been using Galloping the Globe as a rough curriculum outline for our studies. At the start of the year I was glued to it, but the more we progress in our school year, the more comfortable I am figuring out my own plans (and sometimes now forget to use the book until I'm almost finished with my planning).

I usually do a post each week that talks about what we've been covering in our studies. If you'd like to see what we've been doing this year so far, you can following this link "Galloping the Globe". If you are more interested in a specific country, check out my sidebar where I've listed each country as we've studied them (scroll waaaaay down), along with the different animals and lapbooks that we've done. Just click the label/tag and you should find your way around. I've done my best to include the great links that I've found along with the resources that we've used or made along the way.

With our preschooler, our year has become one where we are doing a unit on the alphabet. Each week we talk about a new letter of the alphabet and all of our activities relate to that specific letter. I do a weekly summary on our activities here on Fridays and have pegged it the 'Preschool Corner'.

And as for my favorite unit study we've done so far? To narrow it down to one is rather hard, so I'll give you a couple that we've loved. Exploring Antarctica took us much longer than we thought and was very fun. Lapbooking enters our studies occasionally and I put one together this last year based on The Legend of the Easter Egg - we were going to have to enjoy it since I put so much work into it!

Have a question about what we're doing? Feel free to ask away.