A few years ago I decided to completely put together my own curriculum for the year. My son, who was 6 at the time, wanted to be a scientist and was therefore interested in scientists.
It seemed logical to base our studies on scientists.
Great idea - but now what? I was stuck on the "how". I was at a garage sale about that time and found Isaac Asimov's "Breakthroughs in Science". I thought it would make a good contribution to our study.
As I was looking at the variety of charts in Valerie Bendt's book, I was inspired to use Asimov's book as the basis for our curriculum, and to tie in history, geography, math, printing, grammar, art and of course, science. One of the forms brought it all together for me, and made it so easy to tie all of these subjects together. We had a wonderful year, and my son has a great book that he made as we covered each scientist.
If you think you'd like to try unit studies, this book will help you in the planning stages. The author talks about the five R's of unit studies: research, reading, writing, recording and reporting. She includes ideas from unit studies she has done and there are filled in examples for many types of unit studies.
