Review: Funtastic Unit Studies

8/1/2015

For the last few weeks it has been my privilege to review a book from Funtastic Unit Studies. This book is called Science Unit Studies For Homeschoolers and Teachers. This is a physical book with twenty chapters divided into ages 4-7 and ages 8-13. Science broken down into easily understood language with experiments. Isn't great when you can use Unit Studies to advance your children's learning? :)

What can I say about Funtastic Unit Studies? My son was most intrigued when the book came and immediately picked out the studies he wanted to focus on. Atoms and Molecules, Insects, Plants and Simple Machines. Did we get through them all? Of course not! We had vacation in the middle of that... with plans to work on plants and machines but life happens right? We kept up our focus on insects and learned a few things about plants along the way. :)

Atoms, Molecules and learning about the periodic table... My lad was fascinated by all these tiny atoms that make up other things. He has some toys that are finger sized and they were jumping all over the periodic table finding different elements and talking about them. Some of course wanted to own them all and it did break down into a major battle... but water (as H20) came in and wiped them all away. :) Instead of using marshmallows and toothpicks to make the molecules we used a kit I picked up a LONG time ago and just played around with it. It was fun and he learned much. He also much enjoyed the sugar crystals we made... what can I say.. HUGE HIT.

Insects for Age 8-13 is different then the insects study for age 4-7 but both units work together well. I have to admit, we didn't do any of the experiments from this unit study. We just used the unit study as a jumping off point for learning more about insects in general. On our camping trip we met some great naturalists who happily helped my boy learn more about dragonflies (how to tell a male from a female), how to differentiate between them and damselflies (similar classification but different species), the different species of biting flies (horse, deer, black etc), we learned what happens when the food chain goes out of whack (kill the wolves, deer population explodes, eating all the plants that a certain butterfly exist solely on, leading to the extirpation of that butterfly). It was so interesting, and in some ways rather sad as that butterfly was quite pretty.

This is an imperial moth. This is a BIG moth.

Studying insects at a campground up north, easily lent itself to also studying plants. One of the ways to find insects is to look on plants. This led to us being able to find crab spiders hiding in flowers, caterpillars hiding on the undersides of leaves, seeing the dew on the top of the plants but not on the bottom, seeing how some plants have smooth leaves and others have fuzzy ones and even the fact that some plants are preferred by a wide variety of insects and others seem to have this "turn off" aspect to them. We even discovered plants that EAT insects! (blow my lad's mind that!). I really liked the versatility of this science book. Experiments provided, with explanation as to why, leaving me free to adapt the information to the environment that I was in. So no need to do crafts and experiments as long as the information could be imparted in the real natural world that we found ourselves in.

Sundew and pitcher plants

So what do you get?
One book. 20 chapters. 10 to ages 4-7 and 10 for ages 8-13.
I focused on the 8-13 ages as my lad is 10.
Chapters include:

Insects
Microscopes and Invisible creatures
Atoms and Molecules
Matter
Chemistry Fun
Weather
Force and Motion
Simple Machines
Light and Color
Plants II

I can easily see us doing more of the chapters as our school year progresses.
Experiments are done using materials easily found at home like aluminum foil, cups, Styrofoam, marshmallows, milk cartons etc. This list is found at the beginning of each chapter.

Each chapter is broken down into smaller segments easily enabling a person to go slowly or more quickly through the unit depending on how fast you process each section. A unit can be done in as little as one week or as long as four weeks.

Lots of diagrams throughout the chapter help you find templates or to see how an experiment should be done. You will find lots of fun things to do for teaching science contained within the pages of Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers.

Each chapter ends with a quiz so children (and parents) can see what was learned. Answer pages are included at the end of the book.