When I started home educating, lesson planning felt overwhelming some days. There was too much to cover, too many ways to cover it, and no obvious place to start. The thing that helped most wasn’t a curriculum or a timetable — it was understanding that most homeschool lessons are one of three things: a skill lesson, a topic lesson, or a project lesson. Once you know which one you’re planning, the planning process is easier.
Skill-based lessons teach a specific tool. It might be subject-specific — calculating percentages, using quotation marks correctly, reading a map — or skills transferable across subjects, like how to create a spreadsheet, structure an essay, or use citations. Skill lessons can also be pure practice: handwriting, compass work, typing. The goal isn’t new knowledge; it’s developing a tool that will help learners apply or demonstrate learned knowledge.
Topic-based lessons are broader. The objective is to explore, introduce, or expand knowledge about something — a date in history, an aspect of climate change, a mathematical concept, a country. The child comes out knowing something they didn’t know before, or with a more comprehensive knowledge of something introduced previously.
Project-based lessons ask children to combine what they already know — skills and topic knowledge together — to produce something. A written piece, a presentation, a research folder, a practical outcome. Projects are particularly good for making visible what self-led or interest-led learning has actually achieved, because they require the learner to organise and demonstrate their knowledge rather than simply accumulate it.
In practice, these three overlap constantly. A project will require skills; a topic lesson might produce a small piece of project work. The value of the framework isn’t that lessons fit neatly into one box — it’s that thinking about which box a lesson primarily belongs to helps you plan it. A skill lesson needs to teach the skill before it asks the student to use it. A topic lesson should build on what they already know before introducing new information. A project lesson needs all the components to be in place before you set the task. (You can read more about what we include in a home-ed project here.)
The book list example
A worked example: the lesson objective is writing a book list.
For a younger learner, this is a skills lesson — the goal is to learn how to record information in a structured way. The skills needed are basic, but formative: holding a pen, writing in a list format, and knowing what information to include.
For a middle-school learner, the same task becomes a topic lesson that also builds skills — the book list is now a spreadsheet, includes publication dates and genres, perhaps links.
For a senior learner, the project version follows: choose two books from the genre of your list, compare them, recommend one and explain why. Same subject, three completely different lessons, each requiring different preparation and different skills to be in place first.
On clarity
This seems obvious written down, but it took me a while to actually do it consistently: children need more clarity about what they’re being asked to do than we tend to give them.
“Write a book list” produces umming and ahhing. “Write a book list using bullet points, with the title and author for each one” produces a child who gets straight to work. The task is identical. The clarity is not. For older or more independent learners, the tasks are more complex but the principle holds — if a learner knows exactly what’s expected of them, including which skills they’ll need to use, the “where do I start” paralysis largely disappears. Checklists can help learners retain this clarity as they work through the task independently – small fixes, big wins.
Remind them of the tools they have before you ask them to use them. This is not hand-holding; it’s good teaching, and is where the parent-teacher dynamic can be capitalised on most effectively.
ps. Lesson planning doesn’t have to be overwhelming – there’s a simple formula to follow here that simplifies the process.
