I’d like to welcome Surya from Teach Me I’m Yours. She’s going to be sharing how you can easily create your own unit studies.  

Unit studies are a great way to accomplish your schoolwork while allowing your child to pursue their passions. There are unit studies that you can buy where all the resources are ready for you and you can just open and go, but today I’d like to talk about creating your own unit studies. Creating your own unit studies for your homeschool opens up endless possibilities of what you could study and how you can study it.

Unit studies are also great if you are trying to teach multiple ages at once. You can often cover several subjects together as a family, which cuts down on your overall school time and work.

We’re going to talk about how to choose topics, what subjects to cover, suggestions for gathering resources, and scheduling the lessons for your DIY unit study.

Let’s get started!

What Will You Study?

There are so many topics you can cover with unit studies that it can get overwhelming – I mean you can literally study anything, so how do you choose?

One of the reasons I love incorporating unit studies into our homeschool is because it allows for child-led learning. So, my favorite way to decide what to study is to ask my kids!

Related: The 4 Pillars of Natural Learning

They are going to be the ones learning it, so they should like what they are learning about, right?

Now, my girls are in elementary school, so sometimes when I go to them and say “What would you like to learn about?” they just stare back at me because the choice is too big. You can narrow it down by picking three to five age-appropriate topics then giving your child(ren) the final choice. This is also a great way to do it if there are certain topics that you want to be sure that you cover during the year.

I’m big on examples, so let’s have an example. If my daughters were not sure what they want to study, then I might suggest this list of ideas for early elementary:

• Tornadoes
• American Inventors
• Early American Figures
• Horses
• Insects

For this post, we’ll use the Horses Unit Study example because my one daughter is obsessed with horses.

Choose the Subjects to Cover

Now that we know we are going to be creating a unit study around horses, let’s talk about what school subjects we want to cover during our unit.

Do you want this unit to cover most (or all) of your school subjects? Or do you want to just use it to cover a few (maybe science, history, language arts)? Either one is fine, but some units lend themselves more easily to some subjects than others. Also, math is easier to incorporate in the younger grades, but still doable in the upper grades.

For our Horses unit study, I made a list of the school subjects I thought would be pretty easy to incorporate and made a few quick notes about ideas for covering those subjects. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Science could be covered by talking about mammals and also the characteristics of other animal classifications.

Geography can cover where in the world horses live today and where they used to live in the past.

Speaking of the past, we can learn about famous horses throughout history and also the different ways horses have been used over the ages.

Reading can be covered by seeking out some great horse books (picture books, read alouds, and/or chapter books (independent reading) depending on the age of your kiddos)

For spelling, we can work on equine vocabulary – both spelling and just learning new words.

Math can also be incorporated with a little work: we could calculate how much a horse will eat over a period of time, compare and contrast different breeds of horses in a graph or chart, or convert units (hands to feet, etc.)

Art could be learning how to paint or draw a horse from a drawing book or YouTube video.

Here are the ideas I was able to quickly come up with for covering different subject areas during our Horses Unit Study.