So I never intended to build a house, but our house burned down and things were out of my control. Thus the building process began and what a learning experience it turned out to be.
As a homeschool family I like to have us learn about things that affect our everyday lives. And since building a house was going to be consuming our thoughts and time anyway, I decided that we were going to do one giant unity study on Building a House. We looked at every aspect of what it took to build a house.
There are tons of great resources available. We started with the house building process in general and then we worked down to all the details.
If you are someone who is thinking of for beginning to build a house and you have younger kids, I highly recommend the book How a house is Built by Gail Gibbons. It is very thorough yet written in a way that kids can understand. It was a good one for helping my 8 year old get the big picture of what all was going on.
Another great book I found is Ultimate Spotlight: Home Construction. This book has a great overview of everything that goes into building a house and I love that it is interactive. This helps reinforce all the concepts with the younger age group.
If your kids are just a little bit older, Who Works Here? Construction Site was my favorite for the ways that each job actually gets done. It seemed to break things down even more and talked about specific tools. This one was especially helpful for my 11 year old. We used it a lot. When they started doing our excavating, my kids knew all about a laser planer and the names and the massive machines that showed up. It was helpful for them to have a knowledge of what to expect next and encouraged them to talk more with the people on our job site.
When we understood the overview of building a house, then we broke it down into the details. How does the electricity, plumbing, HVAC, etc. work? This part was really interesting because as someone who has lived in houses my whole life, I just took for granted that things just work. Learning how was long overdue.
Since our house was going to have electricity, we studied electricity from the history (Franklin, Tesla and Edison), science, and types (alternating currents, direct currents, hydro, solar, etc.). If you ever find yourself at Niagara Falls, NY, I highly suggest you go visit their power plant. It has a phenomenal education area of the history, science and future of electricity.
We learned What's It Really Like to Be an Electrician? . We used books and videos along with hands on science kits. My kids really enjoyed Snap Circuit sets. We own a basic set but I also found this cool one about My Home Electronics.
Since we were having plumbing we talked about the history and science. The kids like knowing about the Toilet: How It Works. They learned about what it's like to be a plumber.
For math we practiced measuring, angles, area, perimeter, etc.. Measuring is super important. While helping on the job site my oldest got to see first hand what happens when something isn't measured correctly. A wrong size wall needs to be laid back down, taken apart, cut and rebuilt. Remember, measure twice cut one!
For art we focused a lot on color. Color theory, complimentary colors, tones, and how light affects color. We spent a ton of time at the paint store picking out samples we liked and then took them different places to see what they looked like in those lights. My younger son loved this part.
There is so much teaching to do when you do an in depth study of building a house. The older your kids the more you can dive into all the different aspects. If you are building a house or know someone who is, I can't encourage you enough to study it out. I don't remember much of what I learned in grade school, but these are lessons my kids won't forget.
