I am just loving HomeSchool Share!

Some of you know that we used to be unschoolers, but now we're not. I don't want to belabor those details of how or why things changed, except to say that what we did then was good for Then, and what we're doing now is good for Now.

I would like to think, however, that we've stepped just a few steps to the right of unschooling, instead of doing something wildly different. And one thing that has really really helped has been a website called Homeschool Share.

I used to dislike the idea of unit studies for two reasons:

1) I heard people who tried it said that it was a lot of work. And this seems easy to believe. For example, if I wanted to do a unit on whales, I'd have to do a lot of research to get books, videos, think of activities, and for that matter, learn more about whales myself.

2) It seemed awfully contrived. For example, I read about someone doing a unit study curriculum called KONOS and the unit was on Attentiveness. So first they studied the biology of the eyes, because you need to use your eyes to be attentive, and then they studied some famous person (I forget who) who was attentive, and so on. Okay ... but that connection seems so tenuous, why even bother? Why not just study eyes?

Anyway, we are moving more and more into unit studies ourselves, thanks to Ami and the other folks at HSS. And the more I get into it, the more I really really like it.

The two things that make it really great is that:

1) There is so much to choose from. You can never do all the units listed there, even if you have several children. There is a ton of variety and flexibility. Oh, and I should mention that there are many many lapbooks, if you're into that. (We are, but we're taking a brief break from them at the moment.)

2) All the work is done for you. For example, a couple weeks ago we finished this unit on chocolate. We made bar graphs of M&Ms, watched an on-line tour of a chocolate factory, drew pictures of cacoa trees, colored maps of where cacoa trees grow, read about the rainforest, etc.

Did I come up with all this stuff myself? Heck, no!! It was all right there. Some of it I modified very slightly. Much of it I left out, because there was more than enough.

Then we started doing "book units." If any of you are familiar with a curriculum called Five in a Row, it's based on that concept: You read a picture book once every day for a week, then have a different lesson afterwards. The original FIAR idea (although I'm sure some people modify it) is, LA one day, math the next day, etc.

For example, we did HSS's week-long unit about the book Popcorn at the Palace. After reading it on Monday, we made a story disc and put it on our wall map on Illinois, where the main character lived. We talked about pioneers and the state of Illinois.

Another day we read the story, then talked about how their trip took "three weeks." How many days is that? We made a chart of seven times tables and used a hundred chart to figure it out. (Yes, I do realize that is still a bit contrived, but it seems to work.)

One thing I like about this idea, which I discovered by reading an article by Jane Claire Lambert, the author of FIAR, is that every day, just reading the book again is a review of the previous day's "lesson."

For example, the second day while we read Popcorn at the Palace, my girls might have been thinking, "Oh yeah, Illinois. I remember where that was on the map. It's sometimes called the Corn State, or Prarie State." (Of course, it's just as possible that they were thinking about their favorite Hannah Montana episode, or what piece of Halloween candy they would like to eat later that day, but you get the point.)

For someone like me, who has always loved BooksBooksBooksBooksBooks, it's a very nice fit. The idea is that kids will really enjoy the books you do a unit on, because you read them so often and explore so many details about them. I hope that proves to be true. We have always read tons, but before we just read Whatever, and we read it and that was it. And that was fun too. But I like the idea of doing something with some of the things we read, and hopefully making it more memorable.