What is a Unit Study

What is a unit study?
It is defined as an in-depth study of a topic (space, trees, cars, etc.) that takes into account many areas of the topic, such as geography, science, history, art, etc. It is a complete immersion into the topic so that the student will see things as a "whole" instead of bits and pieces learned throughout their education. Instead of learning about whales in the third grade, the oceans in the fourth grade, explorers in the fifth grade, and sea life in the sixth grade, for example, the student learns about all of these during a unit study of the ocean. He/She is exposed to the geography, spelling and vocabulary, and plant and animal life of the ocean. In learning these things, the student will develop and sharpen skills like reading, writing, researching, and so on. by Amanda Bennett

This is what we do for school every week, we select a book, we read it or "row it" five days in a row, or in our case four days in a row, we skip Wednesdays. We learn about geography, language arts, science, math, arts, history etc, from that one book.

If we read a book that takes place in Japan or China, then we learn about that country. First we look the country up in the world map then we look at the flag, as the child gets older then you can do a lot more.

Language arts can be done by doing copywork, looking up new words and their meanings, things like similes, compound words, metaphors, you get the idea.

For science, a book like Madeline talks about how Madeline needed to get her appendix out. So we study the human body and look at a persons appendix. For other books its an animal or land types like plains, mountains etc. Things like the seasons or the senses.

We learn about every day math and of course art, either how the illustrator chooses how to draw a story or different uses of colors, drawing techniques etc.

Books like They Were Strong and Good talks about the Civil War, Who Owns the Sun talks about slavery, Paul Reverse's Ride talks about the American Revolution and All the Secrets of the World talks about World War I or II (not sure which).

I just purchased How to make a Cherry Pie and see the USA, this book will be used as a mini USA geography unit study. All of that from a children s book.

This is what's working for us right now, I can't see us using workbooks or textbooks to learn this stuff. I'm so grateful that we found Five in a Row!!