Got a thing in the email the other day talking about What is a Unit Study.  Thought I'd write that up a bit here, maybe post a link or two if I can find them.

What is a Unit Study?

This comes from Home school in the woods:

Unit Studies approach a theme topic from several angles, encouraging activity and love of learning as well as discipline and responsibility. Units work best when the main topic is studied in the areas of Bible, History, Science, Health, Physical Education and the Arts, but Language and Math can often be applied as well.

Language and Math are subjects that must be taught precept upon precept (e.g. you must learn to add before you can learn to multiply), but most other subjects can be approached in various ways, either touched on vaguely or explored in depth. In our family, we use textbooks for both Language and Math at the levels that the children are progressing at. However, in our Unit Studies, we encourage lots of reading on the topic, incorporate real-life experiences - yes, even real-world math problems - and try to provide a multitude of pertinent educational encounters at multi-age levels. Here is a further illustration of how unit studies work:

On that same page they give an example of how one can do up a unit study.

Basically you take a topic and then find all the different ways you can to study it.
How can you study say... The colonization of Canada from the different points of view
: Christian influence, Culture - how did people live, work, eat, What type of things did they use to do what they did, transportation, education etc... fill the gambit.

While one does a unit study one can also encourage good penmanship, practice reading, and such like.

Amanda Bennett has a blog on Unit Studies.

Part of doing unit studies that one should not forget as a parent is to ask your children what they would like to learn about.  use their interests to foster learning.  :)

Want to plan your own unit study. Peg has put together a helps page.

Learn how to do a unit study at About.com.  :)  In fact, this page at about.com lists several online resources one can use for doing unit studies and learning what all is involved with them.  Not all the links work, but a place to get started looking anyways.  ;)

I like this page on doing frugal unit studies.  What can I say...I like to do things as inexpensively as possible. :)\

at HomeEducators.com I found this quote

Unit Studies...
"Unit Studies", "Project Studies" or "Integrated Learning" - whatever it's called, this method takes advantage of the child's natural curiousity and works with the natural learning processes to produce real education that's also fun! This approach integrates several subjects and skill areas while focusing on a central theme. Combining a variety of books, resources and learning tools, it fosters interest, creativity, thinking and reasoning skills, research skills, in-depth learning and motivation for learning. The whole family can participate. Each child can work around the same theme but work on different activities according to their individual skill level. Even mom and dad can get into the act.

Anyways, that's good for now.  I can always come back to this and add more. :)