Hi, I'm Jennifer Steward. Welcome to Steward Ship, the Unit Study Place! To give you a brief history of who we are and what Steward Ship is all about, I'd like to introduce our family.

We are the Steward Family and we have been home educating our eight children from our Northern California home since 1986. Steward Ship is our family business, founded nine years ago with the development of our first product, the Choreganizer children's chore system.

What does the Choreganizer have to do with unit studies? Nothing really, but it was the first and only home organizational and life skills tool we developed and while the Choreganizer continues to help families get chores under control in homes everywhere, our real strengths lie in helping families learn how to make teaching their children a joy and delight.

You see, we used to use more traditional methods to teach our children until I came face to face with the facts. My children were bored, complaining, weren't learning much (especially for all the time and effort I was spending with them) and they certainly weren't delighted or excited about their studies. We were just going through the motions—"doing school." I decided to give unit studies a try...and the rest is history!


What is a Unit Study?

With the unit study method, we choose one topic and combine different subjects to revolve around and tie into that topic. First of all, the unit study approach is different from the traditional textbook approach (which is to read a portion of text, usually full of facts and not very interesting and then answer some questions at the end).

Unit studies are conducted in a more relaxed fashion and are interactive in nature. Although this exciting and lively approach to teaching works well with any number of students, it is especially great for large families. Home educating families appreciate this method because they usually have several students whose ages vary!

One characteristic of the unit study method is that of being more hands-on, project and activity oriented. Engaging in these types of activities is what helps students retain and remember what they are learning because they are experiencing learning by using more of their senses. Unfortunately, sometimes these characteristics of unit studies which make them appealing and desirable can also scare people away...if they don't understand this principle: THERE ARE NO RULES!

A unit study can be anything you want it to be. It can be short or long, filled with lots of activities or just a few, it can be something you do alongside your other studies or a full blown unit study that takes several weeks. But the key is, YOU get to decide.

There are three avenues to consider when deciding how you will do a unit study:

— Purchase a complete unit study
— Use a prepared topical guide
— Create your own from scratch

There are TWO key elements to unit studies:

— The READ ALOUD title
— The NOTEBOOK project

When teaching unit studies, we use lots of books. You need to choose a piece of classic literature (a story) as your read aloud title and also incorporate lots of other books to include: living books (historical fiction based on fact, classics, etc.); educational color books, maps (geography happens naturally with unit studies), atlases, Usborne books, Dorling Kindersly, Eyewitness (all filled with pictures and text blocks) and many more! In order to classify your books, think of it like this:

— Read Aloud = Story.
— Source Books (for an "information time") = Non Fiction Books.

It is rare to find a child who doesn't love books. They love to go to the library and they love to just sit and look at books! This alone should tell you something. Soak your children in lots of good books! Your read aloud time becomes the center focus of your study. From it you can pull spelling and vocabulary words and also have the most meaningful discussions—tapping into teachable moments!

Briefly, the notebook is something which should be incorporated into each unit study. Believe me, it is much more than a place to stash papers away. The notebook should:

— Provide a place for students to compile their work
— Serve as a permanent record of work accomplished
— Allow "ownership"—something to call their own
— Encourage creativity
— Provide an easy and practical hands-on project
— Become a reference work to be used in the future
— Become an educational keepsake to be proud of
— Provide a painless way for students to do reports

The notebook project is explained in detail in The Everything Toolbox section.

Unit studies should make your life easier—they should help you actually accomplish more "school" in less time and be more effective all the way around. In order to learn everything you need to know about unit studies, you need to read my new book, appropriately titled Everything You Need to Know About Homeschool Unit Studies, also in the Everything Toolbox.

We're excited about the two "Everything" titles we listed because we believe these two tools offer the most help for those seeking guidance and instruction about the unit study method. Make sure you get a hold of both of them.

But Steward Ship has much more to offer you too! We have an exciting and ever growing series of topical unit study guides (which fall into the category of "prepared topical guides").

Make sure you check out our full line of unit studies in the Quick Look Series section and our line of topical guides in the Study Of section.

Not sure which resource will meet your needs? Request a copy of our FREE catalog which includes information about support, teaching, workshops, books, guides, resources, etc... click here.