How to Combine Subjects for Immersive Learning

So you all know that I like easy-to-use homeschool resources. Whenever possible I love to combine subjects for a more immersive learning experience. We have found a great way to combine subjects with short reading comprehension lessons that expand on science, history, and geography topics.

Several years ago, my oldest failed the reading comprehension portion of her annual review. I say “failed,” but it wasn’t traditional testing. Basically, she demonstrated to the evaluator that after reading a passage she could not answer questions about what she read. This confused me because she was great at written narration. In the event that my daughter decided to attend college, I knew she needed to improve on her reading comprehension skills. It’s not like you can ask your professor to orally narrate or do written narration on a notebook page instead of answer questions. 

The next school year we started using an old copy of a reading comprehension resource that had a short passage, followed by a handful of questions. We did it for a full school year and at the end of the year she had grown in this area by leaps and bounds.

But the text she read was irrelevant. She thought it was old-fashioned and found it boring.

I decided that it would be in our best interest if she had reading comprehension passages that expanded on what we were already studying in science, history, and geography.

So, we set out to create individual units that would be interesting AND teach valuable nonfiction information. They were simple –  just a short passage about a topic and questions to ask orally after it was read.

We recently released a full-year of nonfiction reading comprehension lessons that cover many different topics in science, history, and geography. 

Each of the ten units include the text, a response page for comprehension questions, a written narration page, and an extra research page to dive deeper into a topic. At the end of each unit you will find map work or some sort of labeling activity to wrap it up. If your learner is better with oral narration, you can read the text aloud and have them answer the questions orally. You will even find answer keys for all reading comprehension questions at the end of the book.

You can view a sample here.