Unschooling Unit Studies?

Well, I am on several online lists for homeschoolers. Most of them are unschooling lists, but there are a few homeschooling ones, too. Usually, I pretty much ignore curriculum conversations unless something specifically catches my eye. Well, I was reading a thread on unit studies on the Homefires discussion board recently (I really like Diane Flynn Keith), and one of the other member submitted this link: http://homeschoolshare.com/levels.php. I saw some of the unit studies were based on books that Taliesin and Nathanael love - like Dr. Suess books! So I showed them to Taliesin and Nathanael and read them some of the ideas. Taliesin was thrilled! He's been requesting for two days to do our unit studies. So we began one yesterday over A Fish Out of Water. He had so much fun with it. Of course, we did not stick strictly with the unit study. We added our own things to it - like the book The Little Mermaid, which led to a discussion of what must of changed in Ariel to allow her to breath on land rather than underwater once she was made human. Today, we went to PetCo to pick up some crickets for Dorothy (the tree frog), and Taliesin and Nathanael had to look at the animals while were there, of course. Looking at the different types of fish got us into a good discussion about which fish are salt water fish and which are fresh water.

We also got into the discussion of nutrition, per unit study recommendation (and Taliesin's enthusiastic "YES!") about nutrition, which led us to talk about the food pyramid. We made a food pyramid with poster board and gel pens and, per Taliesin's request, hung it beside the fridge - that way we know what category our food falls into when we get it out. Nathanael even got into it with a food picture book he has by naming which category each food in the book goes into.

Needless to say, Taliesin is so excited over the Dr. Suess unit study. And a manager from work is giving me a starter to Amish friendship bread next week, so we had a nice talk about the Amish today. Tomorrow we're going to the library to pick out lots of books - including whatever Dr. Suess ones we do not have in our own library and books about the Amish. I've said it many times, but I think it needs said again - I LOVE UNSCHOOLING!

(Now back to our checkers game).

Kandy