Homeschooling Help - Four Steps to Creating a Lesson Plan

Although some teachers restrict themselves to following lesson plan templates provided by the Department of Education District office, a lesson plan should in reality be a personalized and user- friendly document. Lesson plans provide a planning tool for teachers, whether they are home-school or mainstream school teachers.

Obviously, an effective teacher will plan for a whole phase or at least year to begin with. The best way to start the four step process to drawing up a lesson plan; would be to begin with a broad overview of the skills, knowledge and desired outcomes for each quarter of the academic year. One can simply plan to make a one page annual summary per subject to be taught. If you are planning for the year's work in Language arts classes, for example, you could in your annual draft, plan to start the year with poetry, move onto the novel genre in the second semester, the drama genre in the third semester, and so on.

Once you have a broad outline for the year, you would add sub-skills which should be covered each semester. You could in the language arts divide the various punctuation marks and their rules up over four semesters. Your language sub skills such as sentence types would have to be covered with the introduction of a statement requiring a period; a question which must take a question mark and so on. You could progressively add to your planning so that by the last semester you will move to the rules for direct and indirect speech, once all the necessary punctuation marks have been covered.

Once you have a broad outline of the skills and sub-skills that you are going to teach, you can then move to thematic units. If you are aiming for a cross-curricular approach in your home classroom then a summary of themes should be added to your annual and quarterly planner. These themes will obviously cross over all of your subject year plans. If you are beginning with a broad theme such as the environment, then your resources for all subjects would be based on environment issues. Quite simply then, your English comprehensions and written work would be related to an aspect or aspects of the environment. In the mathematics class, your examples would be based on the environment, and so on.

Once you know what work you will be covering in the semester which lies ahead, you can move to weekly and then daily planning. A lesson plan must be a tool to assist you to be thoroughly prepared for the lesson itself. You can decide to spend a week on one topic, for example, an introduction to sentence types; then your weekly plan will simply be further divided into daily objectives and activities.

Step one for any lesson plan would be an outline of the objectives of the lesson, the why of the lesson and its intended outcomes. Your objective would be stated as, for example, by the end of the five lessons, the student will understand the difference in usage between a statement, exclamation, command and a question. In addition, the student will make use of the correct punctuation marks to indicate the different sentence types.

Step two of drawing up a lesson plan would be for the teacher to decide what resources will be needed for the lesson. The home school teacher might make use of a simple storybook to start. Thereafter, a series of worksheets for discussion might follow. Finally, the lesson might conclude with an assessment task, to ascertain how well the student has understood the work covered.

Step three of compiling a lesson plan must assist the home school teacher to envisage the lesson as a unit of time. Each lesson should in reality have an introduction with introductory activities such as questions posed verbally; followed by a body of the lesson with further activities and exercises. One should also always have a clear conclusion in mind, to summarize and tie up the new concepts covered for the student.

Step four should take the form of an evaluation of the lesson's successes and shortcomings. While the lesson is still fresh in your mind, jot down your observations, note difficulties and areas which will need further clarification the next day.

The true value of lesson plans is that one can check at a glance if all the necessary resources are in place for the day or unit or week ahead. Lesson plans must make provision for a variety of activities. Take your child's attention span into account when planning lessons. For example you could begin with a teacher tell approach where you keep explanations brief and repetitive, then pose questions, then move to a pen and paper activity. Thereafter you could move to a computer based task and finish with a worksheet which should assess whether you child has grasped the concept covered.

Lesson plans are an effective tool in the hands of a teacher. If for some reason, a day is disrupted, you can simply refine or combine two lesson plans to cover the following day. A lesson plan must not restrict the flow of learning and teaching. If you have planned to cover a certain amount of work and fail to do so, there will always be an opportunity to move onto the concept in a follow-up lesson. Home school teachers who have difficulty being flexible, would be well advised to plan their work in lesson units and not individual lesson units.

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