One of the biggest advantages and disadvantages of public school is the fact that lessons are pre-structured. You never have to worry about there being no plan for what your child should learn next. Yet this is also limiting, as you have very little control over what your child learns, and if there is material that your child doesn’t understand, the class will keep going. Homeschooling parents, on the other hand, can choose just what their child learns, and when. The skill of structuring lesson plans is a valuable one to learn, but practice will help.
If this is your first time creating a lesson plans for your homeschooler, don’t worry! You can do so simply, by simply working backwards from the largest goal to a small one.
Annual Plan
You can start with an annual goal, which can be anything you would like. For example, if you are using an established curriculum or textbook for math, this may be for your child to complete a homeschool grade at the end of the year, finish working through an algebra textbook, or meet a certain set of learning goals so they are able to solve certain types of problems.
Breaking it Down
Once you have an annual goal, you can break it into sections. If a curriculum is broken into 120 lessons, you could divide it into sections of 40, with targets set at the 40th and 80th lessons, or sections of 20, for example. Then, you can create an outline for your school year and figure out what day you will complete each section on, roughly.
This means you can more easily break down the bigger goal into weeks, based on the topics being covered or textbook chapters. You could plan to cover one topic each week in the textbook, for instance.
Daily Lesson Plans
Finally, you can create daily lesson plans based on the weekly plans. If you have five lessons in a week and you want to cover a certain period in history, you could choose one major event to study each day, or study a different aspect of the period (culture, religion, military, etc) each day. There are many ways to approach topics, and through experimentation, you will find the one that works best to keep the lessons fairly even in content.
Things to Consider
Allow for time off, as there will be sick days, field trips and special opportunities, vacations, and so on. A burned-out homeschooler is not a fun student to teach! You can take advantage of the flexible schedule associated with homeschooling and choose different times off than normal – for instance, do school through the weekends and take Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, when most children’s attractions and events will be less crowded as most kids are in school.
Remember to accommodate your homeschooler’s learning speed and style, too. You don’t want to make your student feel overwhelmed and rushed, or bored with a slow pace.
Don’t stress out over this too much, since if need be, you can always revise the lesson plan partway through the year. Finally, as time goes on, making homeschool lesson plans will become easier for you.