Creating A Homeschool Unit: The Human Body
Hey y'all! Today I'm talking about Homeschool Units, more specifically, the first unit we are doing this year which is The Human Body! I've scoured Pinterest, Youtube and Amazon to find some really fun resources to help us beef up this unit. I wanted to pass along everything I found, just in case you are planning on doing a similar unit this year. At the bottom of this post is my Youtube video all about this same topic. I know not everyone has time to watch 20 minute videos so I wanted to condense the information here for you.
First, we are using The Good and The Beautiful science unit as our spine for this. It's a great roadmap to get started, and has 10 lessons on various systems of the body. I based pretty much all of our lessons off of that unit and will use it to keep us on track. For our family, it works best to do about 1 lesson per week. Meaning, we focus on the Skeletal system for the whole week and add in all my additional resources to beef it up! We allow time to dive deeper if the kids want to and expect that this whole unit will take us about 2-3 months to complete. I like to map it all out ahead of time, with the knowledge that we may need to pivot or shift focus if the kids' interest take us farther down one road than I anticipated.
Here's the sheet I created to help me map out the unit. I like to do a rough drawing of the chalk wall, and what I want it to highlight, and then I have a section to track the resources I already have and can pull from, the ones I want to purchase, the field trips I want us to take during this unit, and the Netflix and Youtube video I think will be good to watch during this particular unit.
As I mentioned, we use the good and the beautiful as our spine and then I fill in with lots of other books, models, experiments etc that we want to do along the way. Here is a list of all the things I've purchased for this unit. All the Usborne links go directly to my store, as I am a rep for Usborne. If you decide to buy any of the books, I promise not to harass you about hosting parties etc :) I sell them to help us build up our library, so it's not strings attached if you purchase through me... just an FYI.
Melissa and Doug Anatomy Puzzle:
Magic School Bus Experiments (The Young Scientist Club)
Professor Noggins Anatomy Trivia:
Usborne Books: (Human Body Reference Book, Shine a light, Encyclopedia of the Human Body, Look Inside Your Body, See Inside your Body, Big Book of the Body, Your Body Beginners , Flip Flap Body Book ,
Complete Book of the Human Body,100 Things to know about the Human Body)
That covers all the books and resources we have so far for this unit. As for videos and apps, I found two really great resources through Pinterest!
Primary Theme Park did a post with all kinds of videos, you can check that out here! And Igamemom.com has put together a list of 10 Apps that you might want to look at as well to accompany your unit!
Below is my full video if you'd like to watch and get a better feel for how we use all of these resources!