Lesson 6: Create Your Own Unit Study
Organizing Your Material
Before beginning, list the four themes for this unit study, planning each one to last a week. You may want to begin a computer file or a notebook, with sections for each week. As you gather materials, or think up ideas, list them in your notebook under the appropriate week. Don’t worry about the order yet. You just want to create a file.
If you have a list of units for the entire school year, create file folders for each one. Toss materials you find on those subjects into the appropriate file. Create a favorites file for internet sites on the subject. This will make later unit studies easier to prepare.
Once you have a good number of materials, start to organize them. Some of the materials you find will be only for your own research. Some will be given to the children. Still others will turn out to be useless. If they are too sophisticated for your child, save them in a file folder. You are likely to revisit those themes in later years.
Remember to keep your child’s disability in mind as you gather materials. A web site that depends heavily on sound or a video that relies on the pictures may be useless if your child cannot hear or see. Written materials should be evaluated to decide if they can be adapted to your child’s needs. When choosing science experiments, decide if your child has the motor skills to carry them out and if he can do them safely. Don’t pay attention to the age range listed on the site if your child is young for his age.
There are a number of ways to organize the material. You may want to mark them according to the child or children who will benefit from them. You might prefer to set up sections for worksheets, handouts, reading material, resource lists and so on. Experiment to find out which system works best for you. Remember that any method you learn about as you study the art of homeschooling is a suggestion. You should always work in ways that feel comfortable for you.
I liked to give the children a complete notebook for each week. This allowed me to turn over homeschooling to someone else if needed. Each child had four notebooks, one for each week of the month. Only the current one was in his possession. The others were with me, being filled for upcoming weeks. I used subject dividers to mark the days. They simply worked through that day’s work If we got too far ahead or behind, I could move the papers to a different day. All the supplies for hands-on activities were kept together for the week. If you use this method, you can begin filing the materials into the proper day. In the next section, we will learn how to organize the material into days that cover every subject.
Initially, you will usually have too much or too little material. Try to prepare far more than you think you will need. You can keep these materials in a separate folder, to be handed out on days you finish too quickly. It takes a long time to get used to how much work your child will do in a day. Make sure you are doing the important work first, because many children with special needs will have challenges that throw off the schedule.
