 Hey everybody, welcome to Wallach Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is going to be three things that you need to know about homeschool unit studies in real life. If you've been around here any length of time, you know that we absolutely love unit studies. We've been doing them for as long as I can remember in our homeschool, and it's pretty much the predominant thing that we do for learning. I love them because I can capitalize on Emily's interest and really help ignite that love for learning around a topic that she's already interested in and that's already appealed to her. And then I can weave as many subjects and skills and concepts into it, like geography, history, science, math, language, arts, and she's more willing to do it. She has more fun doing it. And to be honest, she's more likely to retain it because she was interested in it before we even got started. So that is one of the things that I love about unit studies. Maybe there's things that you love about them, and maybe there's also things that stress you out or overwhelm you. But I'm here today to help you and hopefully alleviate that. Homeschool unit studies can be essential and absolutely amazing in your homeschool if you just keep these top three tips in mind. Tip number one, don't do everything. I know you've planned this unit study and you've got all of these things that you decided you were going to do or you purchased this unit study, and it includes all of these different things and you feel like you have to do it all. All that's going to do is add stress to you and in return stress your child out. You don't have to do it all. Pick and choose what works best for you, what fits the day, what works best for your kid, and then just do that. For example, in our unit studies, we include a ton of different things. We include book lists and YouTube playlists and crafts and hands-on activities. We include coloring pages. We include puzzle pages. If your kid doesn't like worksheets, skip them. If your kid doesn't enjoy watching YouTube, skip it. Our unit studies are just as effective if you choose to skip something that your child doesn't like as if you were to make them do it. So even me, as somebody who writes unit studies, I'm going to go ahead and admit it. Here's my confession. I don't do it all. I do not do everything that's included in our unit studies. We design them for the masses as does every other unit study company out there, which means that they are not going to work for everybody in its entirety. I don't like crafts. I mean like I really don't like crafts, you guys. So we don't do a ton of them. If there's a craft for every lesson, I only pick and choose the ones that I know Emily is really going to like and the ones that I feel like aren't going to make me break out in hives and those are the ones we do. Emily absolutely loves coloring Kevin's coloring pages because her dad drew them. So she loves doing it. She loves showing them to him. It's like this special thing for them. If your kid doesn't like coloring, first you could try to paint them or do something else. But if they just absolutely don't enjoy it, then don't do them. They're there for the kids who enjoy them. They're there for my daughter because she enjoys them, but you can skip it if your child doesn't enjoy it. That is the unique thing that we have in homeschool is the freedom to be able to do what works for our kids and our family. So if they don't enjoy it, skip it. The unit study will still be just as effective. They will still learn just as much. I promise, let go and don't do it if you don't have to. Tip number two, it is okay to skip around. I know we are like no, we have to follow the plan. I made a plan. This is what we were going to do on this day or I bought this unit study and this is the lesson we're supposed to do on this day and you feel like you have to do it, but you don't. Unit studies aren't like math and language arts. They don't build on the thing that you learned previously. It's totally okay and in fact, I even encourage it to skip around. Pick the lesson that's going to interest your kid the most and start there. Rearrange things to fit into your life or your schedule. If today's lesson is going to be, you know, this big, elaborate thing and you only have 15 or 20 minutes, maybe you should save that lesson for tomorrow and do something that's not going to require that today. If this week you're supposed to be learning about ancient Mesopotamia, but your museum has an ancient Egyptian, you know, thing on display only for this week, well then swap the lessons. Learn about ancient Egypt so that you can go enjoy the ancient Egyptian display or whatever that's traveling exhibit is. We do it all the time. When we were doing our ocean unit study this past summer, I knew that for Emily's birthday, we were going to be doing a sea line interaction at the Georgia Aquarium. And so I skipped like five lessons to be able to do the Penipad lesson before we went on our trip so that when we interacted with the sea line, she would have as much knowledge as possible, having learned that lesson right before we went when we returned home, we went right back to the lessons that we skipped and we just kept going on. It didn't affect anything. It didn't throw my plans off. I mean, it might have hurt for a few seconds, my Taipei personality, but that was something that I had to get over because I knew that that was what was best for our home school and for her. So just get out of your own way and skip around. Do whatever is best for your child for, you know, the things happening around you and your city and your town that are, you know, filled trip opportunities. Just like for example, if you're learning about nature and you're not supposed to do apples until the middle of the summer, but you could do them in fall when that fits better timing, do them in fall and just skip around and ignore whatever the lesson plan says you're supposed to do it. Tip number three, the fun is just as important as the work. I said it and I'm going to say it one more time. The fun is just as important, actually in my opinion, more important than the work. And I really want you to hear that because as parents, we tend to get caught up in the testing and the assessments and the evaluations. We need proof. We need proof that our kids are learning. We need proof that we're doing a good job and we don't necessarily always feel like we get that unless we have tangible proof, something we can touch, a worksheet, a workbook, a test, something tangible. And because of that, I feel like sometimes we squash a lot of that fire that could be ignited in our kids if we would get out of our own way. And remember that the fun is just as, if not more important than that need for tangible work and proof. Don't get me wrong. I still think there's a time and a place for tangible work. That's why we include it in our studies. There's copy work. There's review worksheets. There is a time and place for it, but it's not okay to skip the fun in lieu of only doing the tangible things. In fact, kids learn better and they retain more through play. So if you don't want to have to say something 15,000 times to get it into their brain, the best way to do that is through playing because it only takes, I think, three repetitions. Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure to learn something through play where it's a whole lot more to learn it through being told it. So by playing with them, you're actually saving your self-time and you're helping them learn it faster if you can just, like I said, remember to prioritize the play. That's one of the reasons that in all of our unit studies, we include principal games because we know the value of play, but we also, as homeschool parents, know that we do need those assessments and those summaries if not to know what our kids learn, but also just for ourselves, like our personal peace of mind to know that this past 12 weeks of learning this unit study wasn't a waste of time, right? Like we learned something, right? And so it's why one of our goals is to always include some sort of trivia-based principal game so that you can play trivia with your kid in a way that's playing and fun, but also by using your mind in a way that is, you know, you basically assessing them and knowing what they've learned throughout that unit study. But I just want to encourage you that the hands-on activities, the game playing, the pretend playing, all of that is just as important if not more important. So try to remember to prioritize it or at least make space for it in your homeschool unit study. Don't say, okay, we're gonna only do the worksheets or only do the testing or only do the assessments. It's important to still do the sensory events and the pretend play and the games and the hands-on activities. Like that is all just as important if not more important than the work type stuff. Okay, now that you know my top three tips for a homeschool unit study in real life, you're probably thinking, okay, now I want to do a unit study, right? So if you are curious about how to plan a unit study, I wanted to let you know that I have you covered with my brand new free guide to unit studies. This is going to be a free ebook and it is going to go over what a unit study is, the benefits of a unit study, how to plan your own unit study, an example of a unit study. So like all of the things you could do with a specific topic, different unit study ideas. I believe there's 50 different topic ideas that you can choose from. There is also unit study planning pages. It's everything that you would possibly need to get started, like everything you would need to get started with unit studies. So I'm going to leave that link in the description box. If you're ready to plan your own, definitely get that and start looking through it. If you are thinking, I love the idea of unit studies, but I do not have the time or the bandwidth to plan my own, then I'm also going to leave in the description box a link to our shop because we have tons of different unit studies that just might be the topic that your kid is interested in and they're already made for you. So you could just purchase one and start it in your home school today. And then I would love before I go for you guys to leave all of your unit study tips and tricks in the comments and tell me what your last unit study was. I would love to hear the topic of the last thing that you were learning in your home school.