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.
When we started homeschooling our children, I’d write bullet-pointed lesson plans, and they’d often restrict the lesson or leave me feeling like we hadn’t done what we should when the actual lesson deviated from the plan. As a parent-teacher, your instinct is to follow where the questions lead. That’s not a bad thing; it’s actually a benefit of home-education — call it responsive teaching if you like.
Now? I define the lesson objective beforehand, then write the lesson plan during the lesson. Not before. During — as I’m explaining it, alongside the children, so that writing it out becomes its own form of clarifying what we’re doing and why. It works just as well. Sometimes better, it’s better because the questions they ask in real time are better than the ones I anticipate the night before.
This is not me confessing to chaos. It’s me saying that lesson plans are a tool, and tools are supposed to be useful, and if the pre-planning version of this particular tool is adding stress rather than removing it — skip it. Or adapt it. The lesson plan isn’t the point. The lesson is.
That said, understanding what makes an effective lesson makes teaching significantly easier, particularly when you’re starting out or teaching a subject you’re less confident in. Here’s the lesson framework I use to guide home-ed lessons – both when planning and teaching.
Start with an objective
Before anything else: what is this lesson for? The objective can be narrow — learning one specific grammar rule, one maths concept — or broad — developing the ability to discuss an argument and counter it. What matters is that you know the goal before you begin. It also helps to tell the learner the goal. “By the end of this we’ll have covered X” keeps everyone pointed in the same direction, including you.
Before settling on the objective, ask what they already know. This is worth doing every time because children absorb information passively at a rate that will consistently surprise you, and there is nothing more deflating than spending twenty minutes teaching something they could already tell you in their own words.
Collect what you need
With an objective identified, gather the resources — textbook, video, worksheet, whatever fits the lesson. One thing worth knowing about home-ed versus classroom teaching: one-to-one lessons move faster. If you’re using pre-made resources designed for a school classroom, you will likely get through them quicker than planned. Having something in reserve — an extension exercise, a follow-up question, a conversational curriculum detour — means the lesson doesn’t run dry before the time does. (But if the lesson finishes before you thought it would, and the objectives have been met? Take the bonus free time and don’t overthink it — home-ed needn’t follow school’s timings.)
A simple order that works across subjects
Review — remind them of what they already know that connects to today’s lesson. This isn’t testing; it’s warming up. It also means you catch any gaps before they become problems mid-lesson.
Teach — introduce the new material. Tell them how the lesson will run. Predictability helps concentration.
Practise — give them something to do with what they’ve just learned. Apply it, write it, demonstrate it. The doing is where it settles.
Recap — close the loop. “We started with X, covered Y, and now you can Z.” This sounds small but it matters — it gives the lesson a shape they can hold onto.
On homework and repetition
Whatever they’ve learned today will stick better if it comes back around before too long. In our house, this happens through a weekly folder — independent work assigned to each learner, with topics from current lessons appearing twice across a two-week period, and again a few weeks later if a topic was particularly hard. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. Repetition is the mechanism; the format is up to you.
A note on the social media version of lesson planning
Scrolling home-ed feeds can make it look like everyone else has typed, laminated, beautifully colour-coded lesson plans filed in labelled folders, with custom worksheets for every subject and a timetable they actually stick to. I have looked at our homeschool’s version — spider diagrams, arrows pointing at things, words that only make sense to me — and wondered if we’re doing it wrong.
We’re not. How a lesson plan looks has no bearing on how well the lesson runs. The spider diagram gets us to the same place. Probably faster, because I spent less time on the formatting, and more effectively because it follows the student’s questions and interests. You can download the simple planning sheet I use below.
NB: Different types of lessons have different objectives: read more about skill, topic and project lessons here.
