Home & Family Facts and Notes

Theme-based learning, believe it or not, is a fun way to homeschool your child. You can brainstorm a theme with your child using any topic your child is especially interested in.

For younger children, you can choose themes like apples, birds, zoo, stars, or even a favorite author. When you choose theme-based learning, your homeschool lesson plans will be more creative, interesting, and fun.

When you base your homeschool lesson plans on a thematic unit, you will also want to determine how much time you’ll need to cover that theme.

You could spend anywhere from a week to a month on the theme, depending on how much your child wants to learn the content. I suggest spending only two weeks at most on one theme.

It’s not difficult to integrate themes into homeschool lesson plans. You’ll also come to realize just how much fun you and your child are having by learning so much through a particular theme.

You don’t necessarily need to integrate every single subject into the thematic unit. You don’t even need to do theme-based learning all of the time with your homeschool lesson plans.

Getting your child involved in the planning process is another important idea to keep in mind. Encourage your child to choose some lesson themes.

You’ll enhance your children’s interest in the lessons when you involve them and give them choices. I think it’s very important to get your child involved as much as possible in all aspects of lesson planning and preparation.

Let’s look at an example to see how using themes in your homeschooling lesson plans would work. For example, if we were to do a thematic unit on apples, we could have a science lesson on how apples grow.

You could slice up an apple into sections to do fractions. You could make Johnny Appleseed the focus for a lesson in Social Studies. You could read books about apples or have your child write a paragraph about apples for Language Arts.

But there’s more: We could turn those apple slices we used in the math lesson to create apple stamps for our art lesson. We could sing songs about apples. We could finish off with a cooking lesson and make apple bread or apple sauce.

The essential thing to remember when using theme-based homeschool lesson plans is to integrate some of your child’s interests. Using thematic units as an addition to the curriculum that you have already planned can help make learning more enjoyable.

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