A Sports Unit Study

Posted by Debra | 0 comments

My son, age 8, had the privilege of choosing the first topic of study for our year – anything he wanted — and I’m still shaking my head over the fact that he did not choose dinosaurs, knights and castles, or flight. (All perfectly teachable ideas of great interest to boys with tons of available academic and supplemental resources).

No. He chose sports. I was never an athlete, never wanted to be and actually ignored a good portion of the sporting world because I was all about literature, words, deep thinking and … are you snickering yet? The point is that the world of sports was not exactly my forte. But a deal’s a deal. So, I dove in.

Aside from the obvious — that we can’t adequately practice sports at home with him, his 4-year-old brother and myself — I struggled to find academic touchpoints, to identify moral sports heroes to study, to locate science ideas (physics wasn’t my strong point either), or to even settle on a worthwhile read-aloud. On top of all that, he wasn’t going for my Olympics/Ancient Greece angle. Where is Amanda Bennett when you need her? (I checked her site too.)

Well, it’s now Day One. School is on. He’s excited. And this is what I have planned.

Unit Base: The skeletal piece of our study comes from a Project Pack from In the Hands of a Child. It’s a very involved lapbook project that covers the history of football, baseball, basketball and soccer. There are timelines, notes on original teams and rules, lists of firsts, and nods to how the depression and WWII affected some of the games. As we read through the history we pull out the globe and note the geography surrounding the origins of the games. We’ll also pull vocabulary out of the packet’s notes. These are great bones to build on.

Read Aloud: I searched and searched but great children’s fiction doesn’t seem to revolve around sports. So, to appease his sense of wonder while learning about the game of baseball we’re reading Jackie and Me by Dan Gutman. It’s about a boy who travels through time using baseball cards to meet Jackie Robinson. Dan Gutman has several books in this time travel series, but I picked Jackie Robinson because I wanted to address racial equality with my son.

Read Alongs: Back of the Bus by Aaron Reynolds, The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson, All the Colors of the Earth by Sheila Hamanaka. These picture books add a social studies element to our history study.

Language Arts: We’ll learn about poetry using the legendary “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer. We’ll go over figurative language, vocabulary, plot schematics, hyperbole and other elements. We can expand it into a discussion of heroism, or keep it fun by making his own baseball trading cards for the main characters (Character Trading Cards).

Science: We’ll answer, “Why does a person tend to move backward when throwing a ball?” “Which goes farther; a light ball or a heavy ball?” “Why should you spin a football when you throw it?” and other questions found in Science in Seconds with Toys by Jean Potter. For harder ideas like “Maintaining Spin: Conservation of Angular Momentum” (No joke – it’s in there!) we’ll use Sports Science Projects: The Physics of Balls in Motion by Madeline Goodstein. I (gratefully) found both of these books at my local library.

Bible: This is a toughie. There are no direct sports references in the Bible save a couple illustrations utilizing running races and boxing. So, we’ll discuss 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, Hebrews 12:1, 2 Timothy 4:7 and Galatians 2:2 & 5:7.

Health: A friend of mine in an R.N. program mentioned that her studies included learning what types of injuries were most common for specific athletes. I thought this might be interesting and I’ve also talked with my massage therapist friend about walking us through a little of her knowledge and teaching my son massage at the same time. (You can already can see how this will benefit me, right?)

Math: We use a curriculum for math, but I have this idea of taking the roster for a local (football, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, basketball…Denver has a lot) team, mapping out where they will be playing and charting the miles they’ll travel this season. Other ideas would be: figure out the total ticket sales of a sold out game at Invesco Field, chart player statistics, batting averages, or use some activities from Mathletics.

P.E.: Um, this one’s built in.

Field Trips: Any stadium/arena/ field will do tours either with a group or on your own. As I write this, it’s still baseball season so we’ll go see the Colorado Rockies play a game in a few weeks. Local college and high school games are also fun and affordable.

Art: I’ve found some really gifted artists with a focus on athletes. Al Sorenson does beautiful vibrantly colored pieces that I think would be fun to mimic on our own at home. We can also try our hand at sports photography and try to capture the action by learning how our camera works.

Music: You may not enjoy the “Jock Rock” genre, but it might be fun to find out the interesting history behind ballpark organists or pick out the “Charge” theme on the piano. All I know is that by the end of this unit I plan to be humming “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (and maybe a little Queen or The Boss).

Debra Anderson has three sons ages 11 and younger. Her passions are education, mentoring, her husband, writing, church ministry and missional living — not in that order. She has her seminary Masters degree in Christian Education, is married to her pastor-husband of 16 years, and resides in their newish home in Denver, CO. In spite of moves between four different states, she has always home educated her boys — even on the hard days. She maintains a blog at www.emergent-homeschool.blogspot.com.