Unit Study ideas

Back when my big kids were little we took full advantage of unit studies.  I don't believe in doing an organized history program until third grade but up until then its fun to come up with exciting things to study: cowboys, Thanksgiving, Egyptians, and Indians are just some of the topics that we studied.  For Science we studied astronomy, oceans and animals, animal unit studies, and insect studies.  All very fun and interesting.

I realized with a second grader and kindergartener this year, that I need to switch back to those unit studies.  This week I'm going to work on setting up unit studies for my girls on the following topics: Indians, Thanksgiving, oceans and animals, space, and a few animal studies.  

We will be supplementing science with Elemental Science's Intro to Science curriculum.  I used part of it last year and we really loved the interesting science experiments and the girls loved to work on their science notebooking pages.  They felt like they were keeping up with their siblings by having their own work to do.  It was a blast.  I highly recommend this program!!!

The big girls will be using Elemental Science's Living Book series on the Sassafrass Twins studying zoology and then botany this year.  Last year we used their classic series and totally loved it but I wanted to change things up this year.  Princess will be in high school science next year and I wanted to make science fun and interesting this year.  You'll notice that it states the curriculum is for K-5th grade.  We will obviously be beefing up our studies plus both girls need to earn a science frontier requirement for American Heritage Girls so they will be able to work on these requirements and earn their badges.  I plan on using these studies next year with the littles.

I'm off to work on my homework and lesson plans.  I am very behind in both.  I can't believe we start to homeschool in a month.  I just ordered the books for the kids!!  And I'm on week 5 of two classes for my masters.  Only 11 weeks left with two big papers to write