Making a homeschool lesson plan is the easiest way to make sure you're meeting the goals set in your homeschool curriculum. Lesson planning is an easy process to master.

Lesson plans are important documents for homeschooling, but making them can be intimidating. Learning to create effective lesson plans is a skill that can help maximize the effectiveness of your homeschool. Starting with an overall plan for the year is a great way to develop your daily goals

Set Your Goals

In each subject area, set a reasonable goal for the end of the year. Sometimes, this is as simple as saying, "I'd like to finish this math book." Other times, it can be as vague as saying "We'll study Ancient World History."

Use your Calendar

Making a lesson plan that doesn’t allow time for sports, dance, co-op classes, music lessons, scouts and other extra-curricular activities is a common mistake in homeschooling families. You might quickly learn to loathe a lesson plan that doesn’t account for your busy lifestyle.

Be sure to allow time off for birthdays, holidays, vacations, and your designated breaks. In The Well Trained Mind, by Susan Wise Bauer [Peace Hill Press, 1999] parents are advised to consider deeply the implications of choosing school breaks. Traditional schools are off for some combination of 12 weeks in the summer, but homeschoolers have the luxury of choosing to be “off” whenever they want. In Bauer’s family, they’ve chosen April, August and December. Attempting to “do school” in December, she explains, was difficult with all of the holiday shopping, preparing, and volunteer work. Planning family vacations in June and July meant paying peak prices for everything because that’s when every other kid in the country would be traveling.

Break it down

On your calendar or homeschool planner and in your list of goals for every subject, set 2-3 mid points that will coincide with each other and mark those "due dates" on the calendar. If you’re working on the goal of finishing the math book, and there are 120 lessons, you’ll set your 2 mid points at lessons 40 and 80.

In a situation where your goals are more vague, you might want to make a more complete outline of the subject matter with no more than 9 smaller goals (one for each month of the school year.) In the Ancient World History example above, you might want to focus on pre-history (cave men & dinosaurs), ancient Egypt, ancient China, biblical history, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient India, the Vikings, and ancient South Americans (like the Maya.)

Break it down even more

Once your goals are broken down into 1-3 month objectives, you’ll want to start developing weekly , then finally daily lesson plans.

Some subjects will need to be addressed daily, and others less often. A common schedule involves physical education and reading, writing and arithmetic each day and science, social studies (history, geography and cultures), foreign languages, and the arts less often.

Planning to-the-day can seem obsessive, but it actually helps a family stay on track. Many families choose to do their day planning every month or every week. Having the bulk of the planning broken down into smaller goals at the beginning of the year makes it easier to stay on track.

When plans change

The need to change plans is inevitable. Illness, inclement weather or an exciting self-directed project that consumes more time than anticipated are just a few reasons homeschoolers can get off track. While these situations offer boundless opportunities for learning; getting off of the original track can be disheartening.

Having a concise lesson plan is a homeschooler’s best hope for getting back on track. Knowing where you’re “supposed to be” is the quickest way to get there. In the math example; if you’re behind 4 lessons it’s easy to know that you’ll need to either do math on days that were previously unscheduled, skip a few lessons, or do more than 1 lesson in a day. In the example of Ancient History, your options are similar.

Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail

The world is a huge and wonderful place with so very many things to learn about. Some, like the beauty of nature and the joy of friendship come naturally and blissfully. Others; like calculus, latin and computer programming, need to be addressed systematically. Having a goal-oriented schedule for planning your homeschool lessons will give you the freedom to know that while life seems to flow smoothly from one day to another, you are still on a path you decided to take, instead of being swept away by yet another distraction.

More Resources

Each state lays out the yearly plan the public school teachers are required to use in their planning. No state requires homeschoolers to follow the statewide curriculum. Each state's plan is available online.

Anne Zeise keeps a great list of resources. Check out her Planning & Record Keeping guide