Squirt: Here's the link: http://www.marsbasecommand.com/


It's by the author of "The Mayan Adventure for the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT" Jim Kelly. It's built around a similar theme. THere is a story with a problem to be solved. SOmething is wrong at our Base Command on Mars. If you buy the packet for $15, you can have the mat printed. You then build the buildings w/ LEGO REsource kit. You then construct and plan a robot to interact with those buildings according to the challenge. You can then submit photos or movies to the website to share your work.

Thanks, OHG! Cool stuff!

Kriston-

I have to admit, when I saw that you were asking about unit studies, I sort of did a mental shrug and thought, "That's not us". But you know, we do a tremendous amount of interest led and project based learning. I guess in my mind, "Unit studies" implies a boxed program designed for the average learner, or something Mom or Dad has planned out far in advance with little input from the kids. What you describe though, sounds like what we do much of the time, and how some of our best learning happens.

An example: We read about the British Tudors back when Artemis was four and half. She immediately became fascinated by everything Tudor. At her request, we got many library books on the time period, both fiction and non-fiction. She got into Shakespeare too, on a tangential learning binge. At age five, she designed a Tudor timeline and made illustrations of all Henry's various wives and children. She is eight now and still loves to read about this era. She knows all the wives intimately and can tell you their order and how they were "discharged". She can talk your ear off about Elizabethan fashion, food, etc.

My advice is to work with your son to design your own unit studies, be flexible in how you follow an idea, and don't be afraid to go in unexpected directions.

hth!

Our unit studies are like Lorel's... More seat-of-your-pants tangents rather than anything planned in advance. Sometimes it's interest-led and sometimes just kismet -- we had a weekend in Gettysburg that turned into a big long email discussion between DS and my dad and has moved on from the Civil War to "necessity is the mother of invention" and the mixed bag that is technological advancement.

I've not tried to link everything, but everything sort of comes up. They're currently on navigation and Bowditch and there's plenty of geometry inherent in that... and of course history and geography, and DS is reading Carry On Mr. Bowditch and thumbing through the American Practical Navigator. If I get around to recording it as schoolwork it will all go under history. We're still doing other math, and other science (and other history and literature for that matter) -- it's just a side thing that feeds his particular interest in the topic, and while I do make sure to give him time to pursue it, I'm not really involved beyond supplying the books

We get a lot of mileage out of wikipedia and its recommended links.

Hmmm...Interesting. So maybe now I'm overplanning, and my feeling that I was pretty much unprepared this past year may have been wrong, huh?

Good input. I do tend to be a seat-of-the-pants sort of person. Even when I was teaching, I tended to lay out my syllabus only in the broadest terms and then follow good discussions as they arose. I've been feeling that as a homeschooler, I should be working against my natural (i.e. lazy) impulses more than I did last year. But maybe that's not so.

Hmmm...

So let me ask you this, Lorel and Erika (and anyone else, for that matter!): how focused are you on goals for learning? What I mean is, do you have non-content specific skills goals that you aim for your kids to achieve? Or are you more casual about it than that?

I'm still trying to figure out just what makes the most sense for us. You'd think that after a year, I'd be more confident in my abilities. It seems that because I had no time to dither and worry last year, but had no choice but to dive right in to HSing, I apparently saved all my dithering and worrying up for this year!

Hi Kriston - I'm no authority by any means and my current goal is for DS to learn SOMETHING! We've been test driving homeschooling for about a week. But we are really doing a Unit Study on the civilization game! It involves marking up a world map with the actual locations that wonders exist, their real names, where world leaders were born, technologies were invented, etc. I also got a long, huge roll of paper to build a time line. I got a bunch of large sticky notes that we're assigning 1 per item we're researching, so if we need to juggle the timeline or research out of order we can fix the overall timeline at any point. This has already taken off to him diving into the Pyramids and finding out way more information than I would have thought (I was thinking 1 or 2 interesting facts, move onto the next thing). But whatever! It's a summer project (that we could probably spend the next 3 years on) and I'm flexible.

Anyway - I have a feeling that we'll be doing a lot of this kind of thing. It does cover history, geography, reading, writing, etc. (We are also doing Singapore Math/working on multiplication tables via Timex Attack.) I doubt we'll spend much more than an hour a day on anything during the summer (unless he takes off on it like the Pyramid research). If it's a go in the fall, we'll dive in longer and more structured probably. I'd love to hear anything you come up with!

A Civ4 unit study? Oh, girlfriend, you're killin' me! I will get NOTHING WHATSOEVER done this summer if we go there!

But seriously, what a great idea!

I like to look at the worldbook.com grade level standards, Rebecca Rupp's Home Learning Year by Year, and the What Your X Grader Needs to Know books every so often. These can alert me to possible holes and give me a reality check on how my kids are doing. I start at the usual age/grade level and go up from there until I have a short list of ideas. I may decide to do a quick unit on tally marks, or Roman Numerals, or American Tall Tales, if I see that we haven't covered something. I don't really do a lot of planning ahead though. As the kids get older, I sign them up for more distance learning and outside classes, but of course I don't have to plan these.

Thanks, Lorel. I've been using Rupp and Hirsch's books, and they definitely help with the hole-filling. But they're mostly content-based, I think. Less about skills.

I think I'm not explaining myself well, partly because I don't really know what sorts of skills-based goals one should set for a 7yo...

What I'm thinking of is the way that I set learning goals when I taught college writing. For example, one goal was "have students learn how to write an evaluative essay." Obviously that essay could have been written about virtually any subject. The content was irrelevent to the skill of evaluation.

Do you have goals like that for a 7yo? I haven't really had anything like that yet, but I'm wondering if I should...

Kriston - a friend of mine who will be HSing officially this Fall, looked at her states standards (for current grade and one to two grades up) to get an idea of what needs to be covered. And there's no reason to limit yourself to your own state's standards, if they are very low, unless of course you'll be putting DS into PS some time soon.