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The 2025-2026 school year is shaping up to be very different from years past. 

This year we are using our Marketing Unit Study to focus on business topics, hone skills, raise productive, responsible, self-directed teens, and instill a great work ethic. This is a huge change from our regular approach, but we are excited and the kids are responding well to the changes. In this article I will share what we are doing this school year and more about building unit studies yourself.

First, we only have THREE kids in school. That feels like no one. With our ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-grade students working fairly independently, I feel like I’ve been promoted to upper management. For instance, instead of working along side the kids all day, I create tasks and ensure the teams are running as scheduled. As a result, the kids are handling the day-to-day operations. With this newfound responsiblity, we are excited to be using our new Marketing Unit Study to build on these blossoming real world skills.

This year, I only step if they “fail to meet their quotas.” 

I my new role as management, I step in if we have missed work or slacking off on chores. We simply hold a staff meeting and create a new game plan. Disciplining high schoolers is way different than little ones.

We’ve come a long way from the day when we had ten kids under twelve in our little playroom. I miss being needed in a more direct, hands-on way, but also love the independence and the topics we get to cover now that the kids are older. 

With a house full of high schoolers, we are looking to the very near future prospect of employment. I want our kids to start thinking of business ideas and learning the inner workings of, well, WORK. We maximize work in our homeschool and turn those hours into credits for high school too.

Building the right homeschool curriculum is the ideal tool to use in achieving this goal.

Unit studies are a great way to focus on specific topics, hone skills or fill gaps in your homeschool schedule. One of the best things we can do for this world is raise productive, responsible and self directed individuals. As business owners for the last thirty years, we have seen a rapid decline in work ethic and personal responsibility. As a result, I created this Marketing Unit Study to help us instill these ethics while we work.

Creating a Marketing Unit Study to Focus on Real Learning

Drawing on my past homeschooling experience, combined with an understanding of our children’s learning needs, their established foundation, and the desired outcome, we are creating our own full year marketing unit study for the first time.

Over the last four years, I’ve taught workshops, teaching parents how to build their own unit studies for their homeschool in online conferences. Consequestly, these short unit studies are great for keeping other families on pace during the holidays.

In our homeschool, we create shorter unit studies to fill the busy month between Thanksgiving and Christmas because our standard curriculum suffered from our lack of focus. Consequently, we needed more flexibility than our curriculum provided. Thus, I started using short unit studies to help us stay on track without getting frustrated or behind.

For the first time, I released a recorded workshop from our Youtube vault. You can watch the full 45 minute wotrkshop about building unit studies for your homeschool. The video covers everything from choosing the length of your workshop, to how to build a learning plan from scratch.

You can be building unit studies tomorrow

In the workshop, I share how you can use unit studies even when you have a regular curriculum. For example, unit studies are my greatest learning ally in the summer months. They help me get work done and keep the kids sharp. This video covers how I share how we sneak learning in with the kids interests and more. Building unit studies is a skill every homeschooling parent needs to be comfortable with.

Grab the link at the bottom of the article and be sure to bring your note pad. As a speaker, I never teach a workshop that wastes your time. You and I don’t have the luxury of that kind of bandwith. Therefore, my workshops are actionable, clear, orderly and worth rewatching to get the most out of them.

Why are We the Using Marketing Unit Study?

As small business owners, we appreciate the flexibility and freedom our personal business provides. We have brought each of our kids to work as restaurant owners for the last thirty years. Now, my high school daughter is helping me with my delivery route one day a week. I want to work WITH them this school year by using a Marketing Unit Study to share what I know about business.

For the 2025-2026 school year, I decided to help our high school teens learn about the business of blogging. I’ve been a freelance writer and speaker for the last ten years. I am moving into a place where I have more margins of time to pursue my passion more deeply.

Using the Marketing Unit Study gives us a great scaffolding to help us teach about business and marketing concept in an orderly fashion. Students need accountability and I need orders. I am not good at winging it. It helps to know yourself and your weaknesses as a homeschool parent. Building a clear and ordered unit study ensures that all of our needs are met.

In learning about marketing, we could pretent to build a business, we could even speculate and create new ventures, but I wanted to get us on the fast track to learning with an existing product.

What better way than to adopt an existing blog to work on together? 

When I learned that the owner of Field Trip Iowa was looking to retire and wanted to pass her work on to a family that could continue her work, I knew we had found the right project for our family. We became the proud new owners of the site this summer and have been working behind the scenes to transfer ownership and prepare the back end for new articles.

What Should a Great Unit Study Include?

First, lots of great reading books!

My number one desire in a curriculum was that it was literature-rich. We have been a Sonlight family for the majority of our homeschooling life. With Sonlight, our kids read about eighty books a year—deep, meaningful literature. Laughter-inducing fun stories, quality, purposeful classics, and many challenging characters. 

Our kids have become book lovers. We affectionately refer to our house as #TheBookHouse. In all those years, their dad and I have been avid readers too. I am turning to our personal library to share the books that have influenced and impacted us in our individual, business, and spiritual lives.

Second, a way to help me stay on task each day. 

I affectionately call the Sonlight binder “My Mom” because it tells me what to do. If I were to create a curriculum for us to follow, it would have to follow a set plan and be clear and straightforward to follow.

While building unit studies, I want the same clear plan to follow. After gathering book selections, I chose the spine book that would be the core of our year-long unit study of business and marketing. Over the summer, I wrote a workbook to accompany the text.

I used ChatGPT to help me break down the topics and create clear steps for specific projects that I wanted the kids to develop from the readings. You can use AI tools to help with your workload as a homeschooling parent. I follow up by checking sources, cross-referencing, and reading the chapters to ensure the work fits with the subjects covered in the book.

Giving Students the Tools to Learn

Instead of using a pre-printed schedule for each student, as we have in the past, we are meeting on Friday and break down the workload for the next week’s assignments. I want the kids to understand how to navigate their workload personally. Helping them write their schedule gives them experience with true planning of their work. This will help them be able to look at a college sylibus or a work task and break it into parts with skill.

For our curiculum the students read one fiction and one business-related non-fiction in two week cycles. (Book list to follow in the next post) They also complete worksheets for their main reading textbook, and a follow it up with a week-long marketing project.

We break down every step with them for the first few weeks. Teens still need your guidance. I bought each of the kids a student planner, and they are using them as a required part of their schoolwork. To fill their schedule, we opened the table of contents of their reading books to divide up the chapters over the ten school days. We then fill in the assigned reading chapters for their other subjects; science, Bible, and any other school reading.

Each Friday we check out and write the next week’s plan.

These Friday meetings are keeping us all accountable. Do you know someone who you wish were taught to use a planner in school? My hope is that this will help them develop a lifelong habit of planning and time management in the future. 

We are heading into week four, and so far so good.

We are testing the Marketing Unit Study workbook that I created and making sure it is easy to follow. I will share more about it and the full book list when we have worked out all the bugs, and I am sure it supports the robust workload that satisfies a high school credit requirement.

The great news is that homeschooling is full of options. 

There are hundreds of curriculum choices to meet your family’s needs. If you have a specific desire or circumstance, homeschooling offers the flexibility to help you create the tools to solve your problem and help your child learn. We love building unit studies for any time lenght and topic to fit our needs. You can too.

What problem are you hoping to solve this school year?

Could you use some encouragement and support? You are in the right place. I can’t wait to share this school year with you. If you are interested in learning more about how we use unit studies in our homeschool and how to create your own, watch the workshop recording below.

You will learn everything you need to build unit studies for your homeschooler right away.