We love science, anything hands-on and fun is a big hit here so I was very excited to get the chance to review Science Unit Studies For Homeschoolers and Teachers by Funtastic Unit Studies.
This was created by Susan Kilbride, a homeschooling mum with a degree in biology. When teaching her son, she noticed a lack of fun science activities for kids and decided to created this resource so that its super easy to teach kids science in a fun and engaging way - she also designed it so you don't have to spend loads of time doing the research to teach science.
Science Unit Studies For Homeschoolers and Teachers is a large paperback book of approximately 200 pages in length. It's split into 20 unit studies, the first ten units are designed for younger children and the second half is geared towards 8+. The younger units include stories, songs, games and fun hands-on activities like making a model of the chest cavity, musical bottles, taste testing etc. whilst the activities for the older group are more in depth and include writing reports, using a microscope, comparing mixtures and solutions, splitting light etc.
Each unit study starts with a list of materials needed for that topic - most are common household items, so there is no expensive materials costs.
Then it's broken into subtopics for the unit. For instance, we started with Chapter 17: Forces and Motion (just because that is what we were studying when the book arrived). This unit is broken down into:
Part 1: Force and Friction
Part 2: Gravity
Part 3: Newton's First Law of Motion
Part 4: Newton's Second Law of Motion
Part 5: Newton's Third Law of Motion
Part 6: Centripetal Force
Part 7: Magnetic Force
Test for Force and Motion
Each parts has diagrams, teaching information and the fun, hands-on activities that cement the concepts in their minds. There is often a number of activities for each part and sometimes they are placed in sequential order where they build on the knowledge of the previous activity in the unit. A good example for this was in the activities for Centripetal force where the second activity (excuse the funny face - she didn't like the water flying out at her)
builds on the knowledge gained from the first.
These unit studies have been lots of fun - we've used it as a group lesson for all of my girls (6, 8, 10 & 12) and while some of the younger lessons were easy for my older two, they still enjoyed them (especially as there was no end of unit test). I liked how easy it was to pull the activities together (it takes mere minutes - especially if I collect the materials from the list before hand) and how little time it took me to "prepare" a memorable science lesson using this. We spent about two weeks completing each unit but you could stretch them out over a longer period or move through them faster depending on your kids. This book is packed full of hands-on activities and experiments that could easily keep my girls busy all year.
It's really nice to see them requesting these 'lessons' even though its officially their summer holidays and their workload was only supposed to be math and reading. Lilly said 'they were the best science shes done in ages', while Sunflower has kidnapped the book (I found it under her pillow) so she could look for activities she wanted to do this week : )
I loved how versatile this book was, you couldn either work through the units in order or pick and choose single units or even single activities. It can stand as a complete science curriculum or it can provide one off activities to keep kids entertained - I think this would also be perfect for our homeschool group days and can see myself using lots of these activities for our group.
I would say that if you are looking for fun ideas to teaching science, then this book is for you - you can even check out their two free unit studies you can download to see how they work for your family.
Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers is available for $16.95 and is aimed at children aged 4-13 years.
You can see what my crew mates thought of this over at the TOS Blog.
