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're basing homeschool lesson plans around a theme unit, one of the other things you'll need to decide is how much time you'll need to cover that particular 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.

Blending themes into your homeschool lesson plans isn't difficult at all. Before long, you'll start noticing how much fun you and your child are having by basing your learning around a 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 important idea to consider is involving your child in the planning process. Let your child choose some of the themes to focus on.

You'll enhance your children's interest in the lessons when you involve them and give them choices. I think it's very important to get your child involved as much as possible in all aspects of lesson planning and preparation.

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.

Using the cut up apple slices from math, we could make apple stamps for an Art lesson. We could also find songs that have lyrics with apples in them. It would even be fun to do some cooking by making applesauce or apple bread.

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.