Unit Studies: Integrated Learning

Most learning that lasts is interdisciplinary. This is accomplished by taking a whole unit--like North American Indians, owls, ancient Olympics, or the American Revolution--and approaching it in a general, unified way. Integrating the various subject matter provides genuine motivation to learn, encourages better recall, and is more interesting. Isolated subjects usually fail to interest the child, fail to reinforce each other and fail to provide any reason for learning. In fact, by teaching isolated subjects, the child is more easily distracted from real learning. Unified themes excite the child and maximize teaching efforts. Because our goal is to shape our children in godly character, we have designed the curriculum around character traits we want to develop. All of the resources and activities were chosen to reinforce each of these traits. Therefore, all the subject-matter (Bible, art, music, language arts, science, social studies, health and safety, writing, and practical living) is integrated around a character rait theme. Each theme is reinforced by activities using different subjects. For example, with the theme of Patience, we baked bread (math, practical living), made baker's hats (craft, math), studied the life of Jacob (reading, history), experimented with yeast (science), searched the Bible for references to bread (Bible), and studied homophones like "knead/need," "flour/ flower," "whole/hole," "bread/bred," and "sew/so" (language arts).

The KONOS Kids' Timelines are also wonderful teachers of the big picture. Students learn the general placement of people in history. Moving from the general, students are later ready to concentrate and specialize. When Jason Hulcy was nine years old he was placing all of the explorers on the Timeline and noticed they all had telescopes. As he placed the settlers on the Timeline, he noticed they all had hatchets. Likewise, the Revolutionary War figures all had three-pointed hats, and the founding fathers all had white wigs. Stepping back, he viewed his work and a "light went on." "Oh, I see. The telescopes are in the 1500's so that's the exploring time; the hatchets are in the 1600's so that's the settling time; and in the 1700's we became a nation. That's easy!" And he is right. Later he will learn specific dates.