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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.

Small children might prefer to use themes such as birds, stars, apples, a zoo, or even works by a favorite author. When you use theme-based learning, you and your child will have a lot more fun with homeschool lesson plans.

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.

It's not necessary to make every single lesson part of a thematic unit. You don't really even need to do theme-based teaching throughout all your homeschool lesson plans.

One of the most important things you can do is involve your child in planning the themes. Let you child have some freedom in choosing themes for the lessons.

By giving your child choices, you help build his or her interest in what you're teaching. I believe it's essential to involve your child as much as you can in all aspects of lesson preparation and planning.

Let's go over an example as to how you would build on themes in your homeschooling lesson plans. Take, for example, using apples for your thematic unit. You could have a lesson on how apples grow as part of a science lesson.

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 important thing to remember when you're putting together theme-based homeschool lesson plans is to use your child's interests. You'll make learning even more enjoyable when you use thematic units to enhance the curriculum you already have planned.

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