Thursday, November 15, 2012

How Do You... Make Lesson Plans?



How do you plan our your homeschool work (specifically any forms or such that make it easy to map out activities/work)?
  Do you use a lesson plan book, print out pages from a website, make your own tables, or simply use notebook paper?     
submitted by Allyson

I don't do extensive lesson planning for one primary reason.  I know that I would over-plan and then be discouraged if we didn't do everything on my list.     I have goals for the year like:
  • Work through this  math book 
  • Learn about U.S. geography with this book list or workbook
  • Memorize 3 poems
Then we set out to meet those goals.  I have a basic schedule written out on an index card (that's how basic it is!) that shows our daily flow of subjects. Otherwise, I don't make a lot of specific plans. I mainly plan in my head so that I don't feel like I'm a slave to a list.  

If we finish a goal early (for example, last year, Owen finished his math book several months before the school year was over), we might start something new. If we don't meet a goal (for example, our study of American history took much longer than I expected), we take a break and keep plugging away the next year.

If I have things that I feel are important to get done in a certain time frame, I will jot down notes on a piece of notebook paper. At the end of the year last year, I did this a lot. I really wanted Gavin to finish his math book so I counted out how much he would have to do each day and assigned him those pages. Maddie's handwriting was divided into 5-day weeks, but since she only did handwriting three days a week, I planned a way for her to avoid ending the year in the middle of a lesson. 

I choose notebook paper so I can freely erase and cross out and throw away when we are done.  I concentrate the most on recording what we've already completed, rather than making plans for what we still need to do.

How do you make lesson plans?  Let us know in the comments. 

Also, if you have a question for a future "How Do You...?" post, share that in the comments, too, or send me an e-mail! I'd love to hear from you. 


1 comment:

  1. We make our lesson plans pretty much the same way. I feel that's one of the perks of homeschooling. You can decide what, how, when you want to do something. We have rough estimates too. Get this book finished by the end of the year. I do set certain units in our guide to be done by Christmas as a marking point but even that is flexible. Some days Maygen may want to do 4 pages of math and the next day she may want to do 2. We just go with the flow!!

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