Lesson planning can be an overwhelming thought when you’re starting homeschooling. You might know what you need to teach, but how to teach it..isn’t that something teachers train for years to learn?
Well, yes. But like every aspect of home education, teaching your child(ren) is very different to teaching a class full of pupils. Lesson planning is the same. In a classroom, lessons need to be fully pre-planned because teachers have strict teaching timetables to adhere to; in a homeschool class, lessons have more flexibility and so does the plan.
As an EFL teacher, I’ve taught students of all ages and abilities, from 5-year-olds to 60-year-old CEOs and while my approach to lesson planning for homeschool is very different, the structure I’d use to plan a lesson for clients is useful as a guide.
Homeschool Lesson Planning 101
1: Identify the Lesson’s Objective
Lesson planning starts with an objective.
The objective can be as narrow as a specific grammar rule or maths equation, or as broad as ‘develop debate skills through discussing the material’. What’s important is that you know the lesson’s goal.
It’s useful to clarify what type of objective the lesson is intended to cover, explained in detail in this post: Is the lesson skill, topic or project based?
Essentially, the lesson objective clarifies what students need to learn from the lesson.
N.B: During the lesson, explaining to learners the objective is as effective as explaining the purpose of the overall subject study when it comes to keeping a homeschooler’s focus on a lesson.
2: Ask home learners what they know about the lesson objective!
There is little more frustrating (as a teacher) than spending time planning, only for the student to turn around and say ‘I know this already.’ Ask them – they’ll surprise you! A child’s ability to absorb information passively is astounding.
N.B Utilising that ability to passively learn is a great way to add extra slots of learning into a homeschool day: Creating a Passive Learning Environment.
3: Collect lesson resources
With an objective for the lesson identified, decide what resources to use. The resource might be a textbook, an online video-led lesson, or a random source that you’ve collected.
Lesson resources will include: teaching materials, resources for students to apply their learning – worksheets/questions to answer etc – and additional materials to explain the lesson topic. Additional materials might include manipulatives to use in Maths, artwork to bring a topic to life, equipment for a science experiment etc.
4: How long will the lesson last? How many resources (eg. worksheets) do you need?
It’s useful to have a home-ed timetable that plans for home learners to cover X amount of hours per subject per week to ensure all curriculum is covered across a homeschool term/year.
Home-ed classes tend to move along faster (fewer students/1-1 teaching) than school lessons, so if you’re using pre-made lesson plans/scaffolded teaching resources, you’ll likely need additional exercises to make a home-ed classroom last an hour than a school teacher would.
After the lesson topic has been taught, the lesson structure should allow learners to practice what they’ve learnt. In a school classroom, a single worksheet would typically suffice, with an additional one assigned for homework. However, in a homeschooling environment, educators can permit students to work on as many worksheets as they want/need to assure themselves they’ve understood. One-to-one teaching (or 1-however-many-children-you’re-homeschooling) gives you the opportunity to work through the first worksheet/question alongside the learner(s), helping them gain confidence in this newfound knowledge/skill.
If you’re home educating multiple children, having extension/related exercises to hand out if anyone finishes early can reduce any sibling-led disruption to learning.
* Remember though, the beauty of home-ed means you’re not only in control of the resources you use but also the time allocated to lessons. It’s ok to set a time limit, it’s ok to let the lesson overrun, and it’s ok to cut a lesson short. As long as the lesson objective is met, the time taken is only important from a timetabling perspective.*
5: Plan the order of the lesson
Every lesson has an objective (which you’ve already identified). Most lessons’ objectives will be to introduce a new academic point/concept/skill. Most lessons though don’t actually start from completely new-to-the-student ideas; most lessons are building on/adding to previously learnt knowledge/skills.
A simplified lesson order, that works across subjects, is:
- Review
- Teach
- Practice
- Recap
Review: Remind learners what they already know that will be useful in this lesson. It could be a reminder of a maths formula/science concept, or it might be previously learnt knowledge the lesson will build upon (ie. a recap of what happened in WW1 before a lesson on WW2/checking they remember how waves are formed before moving onto an erosion lesson).
Reviews are a great way to start lessons because not only are you (teacher) ahead of any learning gaps, but the home learner starts the lesson feeling empowered – “I already know this!”
Teach: Introduce the student to the lesson objective and tell them how they’re going to get there – “By the end of this lesson, you’ll have learnt X. We’ll learn this by (covering pages 6-7 in this textbook/watching this video/etc).”
Explaining to learners exactly how the lesson will run helps keep them focused.
Recap: Remind them what they’ve learnt and how far they’ve come in the lesson – “We started by looking at (the review topic), and then we covered (XYZ). Now you can X – great job!”
(There’s more detail about actually teaching lessons here.)
6: Homework?
Whether or not your homeschool uses the concept of ‘homework’, reviewing what they’ve learnt is the easiest way for learners to store the knowledge until they need it: Repetition, repetition, repetition.
In our homeschool, we approach homework via a ‘Weekly Folder’: Each student has dedicated hours to study independently through work assigned to them.
I assign ‘homework’ related to current lessons twice within a two week period: I.e. If they’re studying fractions today, they’ll have fractions worksheets in that week’s folder and next week’s. If a topic has been particularly difficult, after a few weeks, I’ll include the topic in their weekly folder again to check comprehension.
Do you really need to make lesson plans?
Although I do stick to the planning system above, I often don’t have time to write it down before it’s time to teach the lesson. Instead, I’ll write the lesson plans alongside my homeschoolers in the lesson, as I’m explaining it.
As long as the learners understand the lesson and you can keep it on track, how the lesson plan looks doesn’t really matter: What matters is that for any teacher-set work, the pupil understands what it is they’re meant to be doing. Writing out the lesson plan together gives me the chance to clarify every step with them which helps make lessons run smoothly.
As a home educator, it can sometimes be disheartening to scroll social media homeschool feeds. Everyone seems to have it all so together! Lesson plans are typed and stored in labelled folders with custom-made, beautifully designed worksheets, and every lesson fits neatly onto a homeschool schedule that families actually stick to! Sometimes I look at our homeschool’s lesson plans – a mass of spider diagrams and random words- and question if I’m doing enough, if our homeschool lessons would be better if the planning was more aesthetic. Objectively though, how lesson plans look has no bearing on how successfully lessons run, nor how capably you can teach your child.
Lesson plans are a tool – incredibly useful when starting out homeschooling and if teaching a subject you’re less than confident teaching – but that’s all they are: A tool. If pre-planning lessons is adding additional stress into homeschooling, and lessons are teaching everything they need without the planning, skip them! Tools should be useful not detrimental.