Or so I always thought.
I hated doing unit studies with my littles, because why do three times the work to teaching writing through trains or bees or holidays when you could just teach them and simultaneously enjoy trains, bees and holidays? I always thought of John Taylor Gatto's complaint about meaningless associations -- "School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners" -- and I avoided units in which math was seemingly unnaturally attached to Presidents, turning my face towards those sunny activities that were more authentically part of a good human life, letting any associated cross-curricular lessons seep in where they would without force.
For his high school sci-fi class, V and myself are focusing our reading around books that take place on Mars. Our first title is A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it is surprisingly hard to find lesson plans for it. I have been finding a lot of other cool high school lesson plans on Mars-related things, though. Suddenly I am tempted to create a whole unit study, to build tabletop rovers that can document the attic, to read biographies and make animated shorts about the lives of the astronomers who charted Mars for real, to participate in student imaging projects.
Maybe unit studies are fun . . . after your kids have basic skills.
I hated doing unit studies with my littles, because why do three times the work to teaching writing through trains or bees or holidays when you could just teach them and simultaneously enjoy trains, bees and holidays? I always thought of John Taylor Gatto's complaint about meaningless associations -- "School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners" -- and I avoided units in which math was seemingly unnaturally attached to Presidents, turning my face towards those sunny activities that were more authentically part of a good human life, letting any associated cross-curricular lessons seep in where they would without force.
For his high school sci-fi class, V and myself are focusing our reading around books that take place on Mars. Our first title is A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it is surprisingly hard to find lesson plans for it. I have been finding a lot of other cool high school lesson plans on Mars-related things, though. Suddenly I am tempted to create a whole unit study, to build tabletop rovers that can document the attic, to read biographies and make animated shorts about the lives of the astronomers who charted Mars for real, to participate in student imaging projects.
Maybe unit studies are fun . . . after your kids have basic skills.