Building a Basic Lesson Plan

Trying to teach your children at home requires a lot of time and effort. Simply throwing random activities at kids may seem like it’s helping them to learn, but without having a goal in mind, it’s far less effective. Your kids will learn the skills that you’re sending their way, but they will struggle in the longer term trying to put all of their learning together.

When teaching at home, you need to have an end goal in mind. What is it that you want your child to learn? This should be the first question that you’re asking yourself whether you’re putting together lessons for your child or for yourself. Knowing what the final goal is will help to lead what your lesson plan will look like.

A lesson plan is a basic tool that works as a guide for learning. It consists of a goal (what is it you want to teach or learn), and then contains different groups of resources to get to your end goal. A teacher at a standard school builds out lesson plans for almost all of the activities that they do in their classroom. They’re not just winging it all of the time. Lesson plans are extremely useful tools for guiding learning.

Lesson plans are also difficult to put together as you first get started - they can also be time consuming depending on the scope of your plan. There are existing lesson plans out there that can be used, but if you’re building your own lesson plan, then you’ll want to have a basic template. Below is a generic template that I like to use:

• Goal/Purpose/Objective: The goal of the plan.
• Materials/Resources: Videos, text, etc. The tools to use to cover the material.
• Activities/Instructions: How are the resources used, and what activities are you completing from those resources. For example, watch video X, and then write Y.

Using the above template, you can put together a basic plan for teaching about most anything that you want. Teaching a child how to do basic addition could be accomplished through a lesson plan, or teaching them about the plant life cycle. Teaching kids more advanced topics is also possible - you can make it work the best for you and your family.

In a broader sense, combining multiple lesson plans together equates to building out a unit or course on a subject. As an example, you could have a lesson plan about how to teach your child each letter of the alphabet. You can then combine all of those lesson plans together, and you now have an entire unit of a course that is for teaching the ABCs to your children. Combining lesson plans together will allow you to create larger goals for your children that they can meet.

While building lesson plans can be a bit intimidating at first, doing so will help your children to learn more effectively, and for you to be a more effective teacher for your children at home.