Creating Lesson Plans for Homeschooling

After 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.