The Homeschooling Report

Over the last few posts, we have been discussing how to effectively choose the right teaching materials when choosing to home school your children.  Hopefully, those tips provided some information that will truly help as you begin your homeschooling quest.

In this next series of posts, we will be reviewing ten steps to developing a quality lesson plan.  Obviously, this part of the process will be critical to your success and should, hopefully, be one of the most fun.  The important thing to remember is that your child should be the main focus - do what is in the best interest of the child.

With that being said, let’s dive into those 10 steps to developing your lesson plans…

Step 1
The first thing that you will have to consider, obviously, is what you want to teach.  This should be developed based upon your state or local school standards. You will also need to be aware of what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for and record a time estimate for your lesson plan to help you to better budget your time.

Once you have your picked out the topic, you can begin choosing how you want to teach the particular subject.  If you chose not to use the state standards to help in developing your topic, you will want to refer to them now to see what specific standards your lesson plan can and should fulfill.

Having your lesson plan set up properly with state standards helps to prove its worthiness and necessity later.  It also helps you in assuring that your students are being taught what your state requires as well as what you desire to teach them.

If you are able to blend your lesson plan with the local school standards, make sure to record links to those standards in your lesson plan for reference later.  However, if you are writing this lesson plan for a particular website you will want to be sure that you include a title that properly reflects your topic.

Step 2
If you want to make sure that your lesson plan will teach exactly what you want it to, you will need to develop clear and specific objectives at the start.  You must note that these objectives should not be activities that will be used in the lesson plan.  Rather, they should be the learning outcomes of those activities.

As an example, if you wanted to teach your class how to add 1 + 3, your objective may be that “the students will know how to add 1 + 3” or more specifically “the students will learn to demonstrate how to add 1 + 3.”

Your objectives should also be measurable. What this means is that you need to make sure that you will be able to tell specifically whether these objectives were met or not. Keep in mind that you can certainly have more than one objective for a lesson plan if you feel that this would be more useful.

In order for you to be able to make objectives more meaningful, you may want to include both wide and narrow objectives.  The wide objectives would be more like ambitions and they would include the overall goal of the lesson plan.  For example, a wide ambition in a math lesson could be to gain familiarity with adding two numbers together.

The specific or narrow objectives would be more like the one listed above.  For example, it could read like “the students will demonstrate how to add the numbers 2 and 3 together.”

In the next couple of posts, we will look continue our look at the steps to developing a quality lesson plan.  Please continue… 

Homeschooling Online

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 @ 2:39 pm on the category Homeschooling Online.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.