Creating Lesson Plans for Homeschooling

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As 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.