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Creating Lesson Plans for Homeschooling

Page 1

Creating Lesson Plans for HomeschoolingAfter you have identified the school days in your school year, you will be ready to start planning what you will be doing on each of those days. This is where lesson planning comes in to the equation.

You will need to create a lesson plan for each student for each school day. This plan determines what you will teach and when you will teach it throughout the year.

As you start to create a lesson plan, refer back to your list of subjects and curricula for each student for the coming year; an excerpt of a sample subject/curriculum list is shown.

Extract of a Subject/Curriculum List for a Student
Grade Student Level Subjects Teaching Materials Curriculum Elements Grace 5th Grade English (Literature, writing, spelling, grammar) Book club Borrow books to read from library as needed       Grammar Grammar: A Journey Through Grammar Land, Pt. 1       Spelling Sitton Spelling Workbook         Sitton Spelling Source Book       Period study (1700-1800) American Revolution Battles and Leaders         Founding Fathers DVD         The Revolutionary War Memoirs of General Henry Lee         Frontier Living: An Illustrated Guide to Pioneer Life in America     Math Math – 5th Grade Level Saxon 6/5 Math         Student Edition         Teacher's Edition         Solutions Manual         Concept Posters         Facts Practice Workbook

In this example, two subjects are shown: English and Math. English has several curriculum elements for which you have to plan while Math has only one.

Depending on the specific curriculum you are planning and the materials you are using, lesson planning can be relatively simple or a bit more complex.

For example, as shown in the previous table, you can see that the math curriculum for the student for the upcoming year is pre-algebra and that the teaching materials for that subject have been selected. Usually, a formal curriculum (such as Saxon Math) will already be broken out into a number of lessons. Most of the time, these lessons are designed to correspond with a school day. When a curriculum is provided like this, lesson planning is much simpler because you just map each lesson in the curriculum onto the day on which you will teach it.

In other cases, such as the English curriculum shown, there will be a number of elements that make up that curriculum and some of the teaching materials you use won't be already divided into convenient lessons. In these situations, lesson planning will require a bit more thought on your part. You will have to organize and plan the elements of the curriculum (planning the lessons) so that you are able to get the student through all of them during the school year.

Choose the first curriculum for which you will create a lesson plan and get to work. Pick the simplest curriculum first, such as one with a single element with teaching materials that are already organized into lessons. Get out your homeschool calendar and begin to plan each lesson of that curriculum for a specific day.

Page 2Creating a Lesson Plan: A Simple Example
As a simple example, suppose I am developing the lesson plan for the student shown above. Further, suppose I am starting with the Math curriculum because I know that the teaching materials (Saxon in this example) are already laid out in lessons. Creating a lesson plan involves identifying the specific lesson for each day of the school year.

To start, I would open my lesson plan book or electronic tool and begin with the first day of the school year (for this example, I am starting school on September 6) on which I will be teaching the Math curriculum for this student. I would identify a lesson from the Math curriculum for each day.

Example of a Lesson Plan for the Math Curriculum for a Student
Day Date Subject/Curriculum Lesson Number and Topic Estimated Time Mon September 6 Math Lesson 1, Sequences and Digits 60 min Tue September 7 Math Lesson 2, Even and Odd Numbers 60 min Wed September 8 Math Lesson 3, Using Money to Illustrate Place Value 60 min Thu September 9 Math Lesson 4, Comparing Whole Numbers 60 min Fri September 10 Math Lesson 5, Naming Whole Numbers Through Hundreds, Dollars, and Cents 60 min Mon September 13 Math Lesson 6, Adding One-Digit Numbers, Using the Addition Algorithm 60 min Tue September 14 Math Lesson 7, Writing and Comparing Numbers Though Hundred Thousands, Ordinal Numbers 60 min Wed September 15 Math None, field trip N/A Thu September 16 Math Lesson 8, Subtraction Facts, Fact Families 60 min Fri September 17 Math Math Test on Lessons 1-8 45 min

The process would be continued throughout the school year until all the lessons in this curriculum are accounted for by being planned for a specific day.

While the example lays out a lesson each day, there will likely be some gaps in this pattern through the year. For example, some days might be consumed with other activities, such as field trip, in which case the math lesson might not be done because there wouldn't be time for it.

Page 3Creating a Lesson Plan: A More Complex Example
Now let's take a look at how you might develop a lesson plan for a curriculum that isn't quite as cut and dried as the Math example. For this example, we'll do some lesson planning for the English curriculum.

Part of an English Subject/Curriculum List for a Student
Student Grade Level Subjects Curriculum Elements Teaching Materials Grace 5th Grade English (Literature, writing, spelling, grammar) Book club Borrow books to read from library as needed       Grammar Grammar: Grammar Basics       Spelling Spelling Workbook         Spelling Source Book In this extract, there are three curriculum elements of the subject, which is English. Each of the elements needs to be planned. Some elements, like Grammar, might include teaching materials that provide lessons while others, for example the Book club, might not.

The lesson plan for English for this student would need to address each of these elements by creating the "lessons" associated with those elements with each school day.

Example of a Lesson Plan for the English Curriculum for a Student
Day Date Subject/Curriculum Lesson Number and Topic Estimated Time Mon September 6 English/Grammar Lesson 1, Grammar Concepts 30 min Mon September 6 English/Spelling Words to Live By: Week 1, Lesson 1 30 min Mon September 6 English/Literature (Reading for book club) The Chronicles of Narnia, Chapters 1-2 30 min Tue September 7 English/Grammar Lesson 2, Parts of Speech 30 min Tue September 7 English/Spelling Words to Live By: Week 1, Lesson 2 30 min Tue September 7 English/Literature (Reading for book club) The Chronicles of Narnia, Chapters 3-4 30 min Wed September 8 English/Grammar Lesson 3, More on Parts of Speech 30 min Wed September 8 English/Spelling Words to Live By: Week 1, Lesson 3 30 min Wed September 8 English/Literature (Reading for book club) The Chronicles of Narnia, Chapters 5-6 30 min Wed September 15 English/Grammar None, field trip N/A Wed September 15 English/Spelling None, field trip N/A Wed September 15 English/Literature (Reading for book club) None, field trip N/A

This process would be continued until all the curriculum's elements were mapped onto the days on which they will be taught.

Page 4Putting Together All the Lesson Plans for a Student
It is a good idea to include lots of field trips, sports, music lessons, and other activities into your homeschool program. As you do so, you will need to account for these activities in your lesson plans as well. In the examples in the previous sections, you can see that a field trip has been scheduled for September 15. On that day, there are no lessons planned for Math or English. However, you would expect to have follow-up lesson plans if you were going to have student's write a report on the experience; or, you might have them do preparation work before the field trip, such as reading about some of the processes used in a factory you will be visiting. In that case, the preparation activities would also appear on a lesson plan.

You continue creating lesson plans for each subject and curriculum for a student until you have accounted for all of the curricula for all of the subjects.

Next, you need to put all of your lessons plans together to form the set of lessons plans for that student for the year. This involves combining the lesson plans by school day so you generate a complete set of plans for each day of the school year.

Example of a Combined Lesson Plan for Math and English for a Student
Day Date Subject/Curriculum Lesson Number and Topic Estimated Time Mon September 6 Math Lesson 1, Sequences and Digits 60 min Mon September 6 English/Grammar Lesson 1, Grammar Concepts 30 min Mon September 6 English/Spelling Words to Live By: Week 1, Lesson 1 30 min Mon September 6 English/Literature (Reading for book club) The Chronicles of Narnia, Chapters 1-2 30 min Tue September 7 Math Lesson 2, Even and Odd Numbers 60 min Tue September 7 English/Grammar Lesson 2, Parts of Speech 30 min Tue September 7 English/Spelling Words to Live By: Week 1, Lesson 2 30 min Tue September 7 English/Literature (Reading for book club) The Chronicles of Narnia, Chapters 3-4 30 min Wed September 8 Math Lesson 3, Using Money to Illustrate Place Value 60 min Wed September 8 English/Grammar Lesson 3, More on Parts of Speech 30 min Wed September 8 English/Spelling Words to Live By: Week 1, Lesson 3 30 min Wed September 8 English/Literature (Reading for book club) The Chronicles of Narnia, Chapters 5-6 30 min Wed September 15 Field Trip to Acme Factory Field Trip 7 hours Wed September 15 Math None, field trip N/A Wed September 15 English/Grammar None, field trip N/A Wed September 15 English/Spelling None, field trip N/A Wed September 15 English/Literature (Reading for book club) None, field trip N/A

Page 5As you combine lessons plans for the various curricula, it is likely that you will need to make adjustments to account for too much or too little class time, an activity such as a field trip, or other interactions among the curricula plans. For example, you might discover that the expected time for your lessons on a day requires too many hours or doesn't require enough to qualify as a day of instruction. You should expect to adapt to changes like this as you build the full set of lessons plans for a student.

If you are teaching more than one student at a time, which is likely to be the case, you will also need to account for the effect of one student's lesson plans on another student. For example, one student's activity on a day might impact the ability of another student to get through the allotted lessons.

Continue this process of combining and refining lesson plans until you have an entire school year's worth of daily plans laid out for each student.

If this seems like a lot of hard work, that's because it is. Planning an entire year of school for one student takes a lot of time, effort, and thought. If you need to do this for more than one student, the job only gets bigger. However, creating lesson plans is critical to being an effective homeschooler. If your first lesson plans seem to take forever to develop, don't worry, you'll get much faster with experience because you will develop a good sense of what you need to do for specific topics.

An Optional Approach
Although it is usually a good idea to plan an entire school year at a time, that might not be the way you want to approach this. Some homeschoolers do detailed lesson plans based on shorter periods of time, such as a month or a week. In that case, the curricula are divided up into larger chunks, such as the number of lessons that need to be completed per month, to ensure that the entire curriculum is completed during the school year. Then, detailed lesson plans are created for only that month's worth of lessons (or week's worth if weekly lesson plans are used).

This approach breaks the planning process into smaller chunks that are spread throughout the year, depending on how lesson plans are being generated. One downside is that you will be creating lesson plans during the school year rather just updating existing plans, which can add more work to an already busy schedule. If you develop lesson plans for an entire school year, you typically do your lesson planning during one of your breaks.

Page 6Updating Lesson Plans
No matter how well you plan, it is inevitable that things will change as you start to carry out your plan. You might find additional activities that you want to do. Or, lessons might take less time or more time than you planned.

Occasionally, the teacher might be ill (sometimes a spouse or older student can substitute teach, but sometimes not) and the planned activities for a day don't get done. As you move through a school year, you will have to make adjustments to your lesson plans to ensure that any unanticipated events don't prevent you from reaching your goals. You should set aside a time each week, such as one of your "weekend" days to review and update your lesson plans for the upcoming week.

Besides telling you what you need to do each day, your lesson plans are also a critical tool to document your progress and to help you manage your homeschool effectively.