Creating Unit Studies for Kindergarten through Highschool

Creating lesson plans are a passion of mine.  I love to learn and I love making learning fun.  It just takes a lot of time and effort, so I haven't done much of the creative lesson planning in the last couple years.  Something about having littles makes it that much more challenging.

For our science curriculum this year we are going a non-traditional route.  I'm taking the perks of homeschooling and running with the flexibility to customize our learning!  My girls gave me a list of what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to learn it.  So I've taken their input and am putting together a unit study.  We are going to be studying Marine Science/Oceans, Zoology, Weather, and Historical Geology.

We're going to start with Marine Science and Oceans.  I've purchased two books as "spines" for our foundation.  The "spine" of a unit study is often a reference/text book that acts as a guide for the course of the unit study.  We're young earth creationists and in the realm of science, finding non-evolution based information can be a challenge.  Our two spine books focus mostly on the current knowledge of the oceans and creatures therein, with very little said about the "history" of where they came from.  A few of our supplemental books do have some evolution in them, but it is a good thing for the kids to know that there are other viewpoints to a degree.  

Our first book focuses on information and separates the different ocean zones, creatures and ecosystems with beautiful pictures.  Our second book is full of hands-on activities (crafts, science experiments, and cooking projects).  I am putting together a lesson plan using these two books and taking into consideration that I have a kindergartener, middle schooler, and high schooler to teach.

As we cover the information to learn, I am incorporating hands-on activities.  For example, when I introduce the different oceans, I have a full page coloring sheet of the world for my kindergartener either to color or paint as I read about the different oceans.  He will get to listen to the information that I'm reading as he decorates his map.  For my older kiddos, they have the same map on a smaller scale that they can label with space below to take notes about each specific ocean.  We'll get out our globe and find the oceans and use post-it notes to label the oceans.  We'll build a water molecule, do a water density experiment, and bake some cookies to decorate as our earth to show the percentage of land vs water.  And that is just the 4 lessons!

I've found documentaries I can stream and fun educational tv series that teach about ocean animals and ecosystems too.  I want to do some sort of field trip, but I'm waiting to see what homeschool field trips come up this fall since regular entry prices are so high these days. 

Lesson planning is so much fun.  I hope the kids enjoy our learning as much as I'm enjoying putting it together!