Homeschooling ADD Kids

Not too long ago, I wrote a couple of posts about how valuable unit studies are. The posts especially focused on how many kids with ADD tend to become obsessed with certain topics, such as cars, dinosaurs or some other interest. If you missed them, you can read them both here.

In one of the posts I listed many sites where free or inexpensive unit studies can be found. However, a recent comment in a Yahoo news group caught my interest. A mother explained how she composed her own unit studies, which worked quite well. She found it hard, though, to keep developing unit study after unit study every single day before doing school with her child. It’s enough of a responsibility to spend 3 or 4 hours daily homeschooling, never mind 2 to 3 hours beforehand coming up with unit studies.

Also, although the free unit studies I listed are usable, they could be much better. They could be more interesting, more fun, easier to teach. They could contain games and exercises to aid in memorization, and they could have links to online video clips and explanations of outdoor and everyday activities that can be used for learning.

Which got me thinking: Why not provide exactly that, within this blog? After all, as most of you know from previous posts, my wife and I develop unit studies to homeschool my brother-in-law.  So we decided that from now on we will start posting the unit studies that we develop every Monday.   One unit study should be enough for one day of homeschooling.  It won’t set you up for a whole week, but it will get you started!

We’ll cover subjects like math, science, history, geography, reading, writing, art, and so forth, by unit studies centered on a particular theme. Sometimes the theme might be a hobby, sport or other interest, as we talked about in our other posts. Other times it might be about a certain time period or person in history. Some weeks we’ll focus on a particular profession.

And, of course, we’d LOVE to hear ideas from our subscribers and visitors.  So if you are not sure how to comment, just click on the title of the post you want to comment on, then scroll down to the bottom of the post where you’ll find a box. Start typing what you want to say and then click the "SUBMIT YOUR COMMENT" button.  You don’t have to even have a suggestion, just leave a note to say "Hi" and to let us know what you think about our blog!

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I think you’ll find the unit studies extremely helpful for homeschooling. Although they are written for those who are homeschooling children with Attention Deficit Disorder, many kids have trouble paying attention. These unit studies will help them to focus and really enjoy learning.

See you Monday!

No Comments | In: unit studies, unschooling | | #

People who know me well would probably be surprised at my suggesting unschooling for kids with ADD.  I loved learning in a school setting.  I liked the classroom and the homework.  And when everyone groaned after the English Lit teacher assigned a fat novel for us to read, I was thrilled.  And now I write indexes to books for a living.  So you would think that the idea of unschooling would be far from my thoughts.  But let me explain…

Although I’ve been writing this blog for three months now, and my wife and I have been homeschooling her little brother for the past two years, just today I learned about the term unschooling.

Unschooling is a rather broad term that applies to many alternative ways of teaching that differ from conventional teaching methods traditionally used in schools.  Advocates of unschooling tend to promote teaching by games, using unit studies and learning by real life experiences. 

Subjects such as math, reading, history and science are taught, but not separately.  Math might be learned while playing a game of hockey, or while figuring out how much money could be saved by buying gas at the cheapest filling station in town.  Science might be taught while camping or when visiting someone in a hospital.  History could be learned by having the child pick a book from the history section of the library, reading it together, watching a History channel show about the topic and finding online video clips related to it.

After reading about unschooling I came to discover that these are the type of teaching methods that we’ve found have worked for Steven and that we’ve been discussing on this blog. 

It appears that unschooling seems to work very well for ADD kids.  Maybe it’s their different way of looking at life.  So many people with ADD seem to see life as a whole rather than in parts.  They want to see, touch, hear and feel the real thing, not just read about it in a book or fill out worksheets.  They want to "live it" instead of just filling their heads with facts.

And you have to admit, real life is nothing like school.

Some Unschooling Resources:

Unschooling at Wikipedia

Sandra Dodd’s Unschooling website

Unschooling.info

Unschool Radical blog

LifeLearning.org

Field Learning blog

Life Without School blog

8 Comments | In: unschooling | | #