Our second unit study of this school year focused on the season of Fall, in particular two of our family’s favorite things about fall…apples and the changing color of the leaves.

One of the consistent themes in books I’ve read about homeschooling is the importance of adopting the mindset that learning doesn’t happen exclusively during certain hours of the day in a certain place. Children are constantly learning. They are curious little humans and it’s our job to encourage this and foster that desire to learn. These books stressed the fact that learning is fluid and can be organic and easily fit into the rhythms of your family life.

The first month of homeschool was an adjustment for us as we slowly rewired the way our brains had been conditioned to think about learning in the very traditional sense. I’d heard the phrase “deschooling” but didn’t think it was going to apply to us or something we needed. I was wrong. Anika had spent three years in traditional school, I had spent a lifetime. We both had a vision of what school would look like based on that and I inadvertently replicated the public school environment in our home. We quickly learned that doesn’t work well for homeschool and you miss out on a lot of the advantages of homeschool when you do this. This Fall Unit Study was just what we needed to see what learning at home could look like.

Fall is in your face here in New England. You cannot miss it. It’s obvious it’s happening, it makes no apologies for itself and it authentically shows up to the party and makes its presence known. It’s bright, loud and bold. The air changes, the colors change, the amount of daylight changes. You can’t miss it. Kids notice its arrival and ask questions, a lot of questions.

Although, I very academically planned out this homeschool unit, I found how easily the learning was fitting into our days and spilling over into weekends and night time outside of our normal “school hours” which I quickly learned don’t really exist. And this realization was beautiful. Like goosebump forming, make you want to cry tears of joy beautiful. This was the life I wanted for my kids and my family right now.

Don’t get me wrong, we have plenty of structure to our day. Four days a week we sit at the kitchen table and complete a math and language arts curriculum for each child (Anika uses the Good and The Beautiful for Language Arts and is starting Rightstart Math for Math and Jacob uses Fundations for Language Arts and Eureka for Math) but the rest of the time I’m loving how flexible we can be with the other subjects and the way we learn (specifically when and how we do it). My kids are so darn curious I can’t keep up with them.

I also realized that things we love to do as a family on the weekends fit so well into this Fall unit that it was effortless. These “field trips” to apple orchards, hikes through the woods to gather and admire leaves and corn mazes were things we would do anyway, but they so easily tied into our unit study. The kids asked amazing questions while at both places that expanded their knowledge on the topic and it was validating to hear them applying knowledge we had learned out in the real world, not because they were under pressure to perform and regurgitate information they had to memorize, but instead because they were excited about it and truly interested.

So here’s a few of our favorite things we did this unit study.

Apples

Books we read…

Heartwood Hotel, Kallie George

Ten Apples up on Top, Dr. Seuss

The Life and Times of the Apple, Charles Micucci

Secrets of the Apple Tree, Carron Brown and Alyssa Nassner

Apples A to Z, Margaret McNamara

The Apple Pie Tree, Zoe Hall

One Red Apple, Harriet Zoiefert

The Apple Pie Tree, Zoe Hall

Life of Fred Apples, Stanley F. Schmidt

Websites that were helpful…

I purchased Gift of Curiosity’s Apple Unit Study Bundle and it was phenomenal! Although I’m not going to mention them all specifically we did everyone of the activities and would definitely recommend them!

We also used some things from Little Bins for Little Hands which were great!

A few of our apple activities from this unit study…

Library STEAM class

We went to one of the local Library’s STEAM class that had the topic of apples.

-The kids learned about Jonny Appleseed

-They learned about “grafting”

-They did an apple taste testing

-They made apple art with baking soda, vinegar and food coloring

Apple Rotting Experiment

Applesauce Oobleck

Apple Dissection

Erupting Apples

Leaf Printing at the Art Museum

Apple Picking

We went apple picking at Conant Apple Orchards!

Leaves!

Books we read…

Going on a Leaf Hunt, Steve Metzger

Awesome Autumn, Bruce Goldstone

We discussed the following things about the leaves changing colors…

What Is Photosynthesis?

What Colors Do Leaves Change To?

What Causes Leaves to Fall Off Trees?

What Happens to Leaves After They Fall?

Videos

We watched these YouTube videos

Leaf peeping drives, hikes and bike rides

We went on multiple leaf peeping drives, hikes and bike rides this year, observing all the different types of leaves and colors. My kids must have heard a dozen times from me how lucky they were to get to witness this every year. How some people travel from far away to see how beautiful it is.

Corn Maze!

We went to a corn maze at Treworgy Family Orchards. It was Winnie the Pooh themed and had trivia questions about the book and its characters.

Our Family Fall Poem

This is one of my favorite things we did and a perfect example of an impromptu learning moment. On a recent Sunday morning hike on a trail near our house, while I observed that the majority of the leaves in the trees had turned brown, I randomly said, “this time of year the only orange you see is on people.” This totally inspired the rest of us to add our observations about the “second half of fall” which we realized was quickly turning into a poem. I jotted the lines down on my phone and then later on we edited it all together. It was an accidental and lovely way to end this unit and this type of experience is what I’m loving most about homeschooling.

The Second Half of Fall

By Anika, Jacob, Jamie and Nichole Cox

Written on a lovely hike through the Maine woods in fall. 

The Second half of fall is when…

Trick or Treating is tomorrow. 

Hikes through the woods are noisy.  Anika and Jake break sticks under their feet and the leaves crunch a bunch. 

Trees let their leaves fall, the evergreen stay but the rest go away.

People wear orange, not the trees and the leaves are only litter.

The days get shorter and the nights longer.

Mommy wakes up and says, “oh it’s cold in here.”

Humans snuggle up in blankets and drink warm cups of hot chocolate. 

Creatures hibernate.