unit studies – Little Bears Home Education

We mentioned this book in our archive post yesterday, and so I thought I would share this short archive diary post about reading it. It’s not quite a book review, as it was part of a larger project, but I remember enjoying it.

We are in the middle of a project on China at the moment. We are loosely following Sonlight curriculum’s 5th grade programme “Eastern Hemisphere” (previously called “Non-Western Cultures”) which is literature-based, and we are using a ‘read-aloud’ called “Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze” by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis. We are just over half-way through it, and the older children (nearly 11 and 6 1/2) are enjoying it. The two younger ones tend to either play with brio trains or run about in the garden if they don’t feel like listening. We also made a giant map of China which the younger children also got involved with colouring.

(We did take a photo of this when we borrowed the PDA from Schome, but I’m still working on loading it properly).

Motor-biker started writing in the cutest workbook I’ve even seen (it’s almost too good to use!) “Alfie Gets Ready to Write” by Shirley Hughes. It doesn’t seem to be on Amazon, and it’s bizarre that I couldn’t find it listed on the internet at all, and… it doesn’t have an isbn number. I bought it from Books for Children club, so I’m guessing it was specially created and printed as a club exclusive.

Editor’s notes:

This post was originally published on my Svengelska Hemskolan and Multiply blogs in around 2008.

I seem to remember that our China project was the last unit study we did with Sonlight before I got ill and we moved from Milton Keynes to Cornwall. I’m not entirely sure whether or not we even finished it. We loved our Sonlight years and, although now I am not religious we probably would choose a more secular curriculum, one of the beauties of Sonlight and indeed any literature based curriculum is that you can discuss it from your own perspective, unlike a lot of American curriculum which tends to tell you exactly what to say and what to think.

I did look for ‘Books for Children Club’ to link to it, but that doesn’t seem to exist now either, although there seem to be several children’s book clubs that have replaced it. If you use one and recommend it, please comment and let me know!

In our more than 15 years of home education, we have moved through various seasons of more and less formal learning. We never quite qualified as bona fide unschoolers (although I was quite attracted to radical unschooling as a philosophy) but nor did we fully qualify as traditional homeschoolers, since we often had very relaxed periods and largely went with the flow depending on the children’s interests, but with formal book-learning available as a foundation.

This post, originally posted on the Svengelska Hemskolan blog, details the ebb and flow of projects-based learning in this flexible framework.

“If anyone asks, we use Sonlight curriculum, which is an American, literature-based curriculum. Originally designed for American ex-pats and missionaries, with a ‘big world’ focus. In practice, we often go off at tangents to study areas of interest which capture the children’s imagination, or to cover UK history, or (more often than not) because I’ve been snared by other literature selections (Ambleside Online, Tanglewood, Winter Promise, to name but a few) and can’t resist adding to our library.

Sonlight grade 5 which I’m using with Dragon-tamer is entitled “Eastern Hemisphere” or “Non-Western Cultures”, and as part of our Sonlight studies, we’ve looked at the Pacific Islands, Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, North and South Korea and China.

The way I deal with this cross-curricular study which,, being aimed at grade 5 and designed to be suitable primarily for ages 11 or so+, is to break it up into areas of study (easy with Sonlight 5 as it is already neatly divided into countries, but I’ve done it with the lower grades too) and do projects, themes or ‘unit studies’ so that all the children can get involved to whatever degree they’re interested. In addition to reading Sonlight’s literature selections, we take out additional books from the library, we make maps, sometimes 3D models, dress up in national costumes, cook and eat traditional foods, sometimes write little books or make lapbooks and other incidental activities.

Some of these projects have been really popular, especially with the younger children; notably, Australia and New Zealand. Dragon-Tamer was particularly interested in Japan (and scared me for a while talking about wanting to learn Japanese!) Others I have really struggled to get any interest going. Hence, I realise, Sonlight 5 (designed as a one-year curriculum) has now taken us 2 years, and we are only on week 18 (out of 36 – a US school year)! I have been talking for months about finishing up on our China project and moving on to the next projects, but for some reason we’ve all really dragged our feet. We still haven’t finished all the Sonlight books on China (though at the beginning we took extra books out from the library). Right now we’re reading a biography of Eric Liddell – Olympic champion and missionary to China. All the books have been fine and good and we’ve enjoyed them, but somehow I don’t think I can face another book about China! Should we skip the rest, save them for later, or take a(nother) break from Sonlight?

When a friend suggested doing a project on Rivers (which, actually I had wanted to do for years but for some reason had never got round to) I jumped at the chance! I have spent most of my free moments over the last weekend brainstorming and planning how we might cover a Rivers Project. We have one of England’s longest rivers running close by, my maps are prepared, and I’m keen for any plan of study that will take us on a trip to the sea! Ah, but now Pony-rider has announced that she actually wants to do a project on South America, please, so it looks as though the river we’ll be looking at is the Amazon. Okay, back to the drawing board…”

And so we proceeded to develop a new project of our own on South America that created memories that still resonate with us all even today.

It is possible to purchase a pre-packaged, prepared unit study that has joined all the dots and made all the connections between the subjects for you. But we found that this kind of fluid way of learning suited us well, and when you see the ‘dots’ and make the ‘connections’ for yourself, the information is that much more deeply learned and remembered.