Advantages of Unit Studies

With a unit study your child (or children) study one particular topic in-depth for a series of days, weeks, or months at a time. This helps alleviate the time pressures associated with moving from subject to subject that parents newly involved in homeschooling might feel.

Unit studies are a great way to teach children how to dig deep and become an expert on certain topics. It teaches them to see the interconnectedness of academic areas and how to focus on one thing for an extended period of time. Unit studies foster experiential and mastery learning.

You, as the parent, can also design your own unit studies based on your child's interests or hobbies. This can be an amazingly creative and fun way to teach, and most children find unit studies to be a natural, fun and exciting way to learn and understand. .

For parents of multiple homeschooled children, unit studies are also a terrific way to unify all the students in the your homeschool around a single topic; a very efficient method that is beneficial to the teaching parent! All aged children can study the same topic, listen to the same read aloud books, but then do activities more suited to their individual ability levels.

Lastly, the unit study method is a great choice for students who need bigger academic challenges than their age/grade level traditionally provides. Some kids have just an insatiable hunger for knowledge on topics that interest them. Unit studies provide the time, freedom, depth and scope to satisfy those kinds of kids.

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