Scheduling & Planning Lessons

It is possible that the biggest hardship that a homeschooling parent faces is how to make a schedule for homeschooling. I've heard many ideas from many parents about how they handle the scheduling issue. Some use software programs and some write every thing in a notebook or they use a program like Microsoft Word.

Some of them plan the day as it goes and some plan ahead of time. I prefer to think that it is a mixture of planning ahead and on-the-spot is the most comfortable and practical when it comes to homeschooling.

What your Goals Should be:
You should first make a goal plan that lists the goals that you have set for your child's upcoming year. This is not as hard as it sounds. Once you have, you should use these goals, and make better choices when you are gathering the books and supplies that you will need.

There are a wide variety of books that have good ideas for goals. These books usually have some sort of scope and sequence within them. You may be able to find these types of books at your public library or you can buy then from a curriculum catalog at bookstores or online.

If you are looking for a free scope and sequence book, you can visit any number of websites like WorldBooks.com and gather ideas from their scope and sequence. You do not have to do every thing that is in the scope and sequence list either.

If you would prefer, go ahead and add your own ideas to the goals that you are setting for your child because no one knows your kid better than you do. When your child is older, he should assist you with creating the goals and eventually you will become the assistant and advisor as he sets his own goals.

From your goals lists you will want to fill out a curriculum planner. Avoid curriculum fairs until you have done this already and have gotten the hang of it. When you are at the curriculum fair you will need to have your goal lists and your curriculum planner handy so that when you are at the fair you do not buy anything that you do not need.

I have listed some ideas below that I've learned over the years about planning for homeschool. I figured that since I have all of those forms for homeschooling on the forms page it just made sense to get moving and offer some tips on how to plan.

The Course of Study

In order to make the course of study you should, you will need to have your goal sheets handy and the books that you will be using close at hand. All you have to do is get a sheet of paper and make an overall plan that lists the subjects, the books or supplies, and about how many times a week that you think that particular subject will be studied or how many times a week the book will be used.

You can even try to estimate how much time you think each subject will need. Once you have done this, you will have an overall look at what you have and if anything are missing.

Your weekly lesson plans by subject are important. Below are some tips for making Weekly Lesson Plans for your kids. I have written them per subject. For those subjects that I didnt mention like history and fine arts or religion, it is because you can follow the plans for the subjects mentioned if you need to. Lets look at them now!

Math
The fact of the matter is that some things shouldn't be scheduled too far in advance. Math, for one, should not be planned too far ahead. Fortunately, there's no problem with scheduling math, because almost all math curriculums are pretty much laid out for you in your math kits.

If your child did lesson one yesterday, then today your child will do lesson two, unless your child had a problem with lesson one and needs a review. This is why you should not schedule math far in advance. Math is always a harder subject to learn and therefore cant be pre-planned.

No one ever knows ahead of time which day will require some math review instead of a math lesson. If you need to schedule an entire week of math at a time, be sure to use a pencil to write the schedule in case you have to erase later.

You have to plan ahead for Math Lab if you offer this type of a thing. Math lab is hands-on activities that use objects like beads, Legos, money, or even a trip to the grocery store as teaching aids. The week before math lab day, you will want to look over the upcoming week or the previous month in your child's math book to see what skills you can reinforce with hands on activities and make your plan work better for you both.

You are going to want to take plenty of time for math. In the middle thru upper grades, it could take as much as 2 hours to complete a math lesson, longer if the child is finding it hard to learn. If your children seem to be taking a huge amount of time for math, it could be that they have not memorized the basic math facts.

Depending on their age or grade, children should know instantly the answers to basic math facts such as times tables. It is well worth their time to do a drill sheet daily until these facts are memorized. Mid-term forth graders shouldn't be adding with their fingers any more because it will slow them down when they are trying to learn how to multiply and divide later on.

Graduating fifth graders should have all four of the basic facts for math such as: (addition, subtraction, multiplying, and division) memorized. If your 4th grader can't answer right away what 8+9 or 19-6 equals, then you will need to start doing a grade-appropriate fact sheet before every math lesson for review sessions.

But, if you do not want to do the drill sheets, another way that you can help them learn is to let the child look at either an addition chart or a multiplication chart while they do math lessons. They will, over time, learn the basics this way and they will eventually not need the charts any more.

Grammar
You will want to plan grammar the way you would plan math; meaning a little at a time, perhaps a week or two ahead and in pencil. Some grammar programs are easy to plan for, whereas others are not. Daily Grams, for example has 180 lessons in it.

You can take up to two years to complete a Daily Grams book or you can do a lesson a day and complete it in one school year. Easy Grammar lessons usually take around two years to complete.

There should be a teaching plan already laid out for you that you have created for this subject. You will need to look over that plan and count how many days of the school year that you are planning to use this program.

The 8th grade Bob Jones English book for example, is designed to be used for 90 days. That could mean that using it every day for a semester or using it every other day during the entire school year. That is something that you will want to decide before you make your lesson plans.

You should look through the grammar curriculum that you have chosen and decide how long you think it will take to complete the program. You have to also decide how many days a week that you want to devote to your grammar instruction. Write your decisions down for your own reference later when you are making your weekly plans.

Spelling
Spelling books are most commonly laid out for you and all your child will do is a lesson a day for four days and then he/she will do a test on the 5th day. If you use Natural Speller or Spelling Power, you will need to make plans for the spelling lessons.

You'll need to decide which word list you want to use and what activities that you want your child to do each day. Once a week you will need to make detailed lesson plans for the upcoming week. I think Spelling Power has the tools you need to teach spelling and it is more structured. You have to make a decision on the structure and how to go about creating the lessons.

Vocabulary

Studying words is a very good use of your child's time. There are many excellent curriculums that will make this easy for you. Wordly Wise is one of those that I would personally recommend. However, you can do this without curriculum. If you have a very good dictionary like the dictionary tells the parts of speech, the pronunciation, the syllables, the antonyms, the root words, and of course, a definition and example sentence for every part of speech that each word has.

Unfortunately, most dictionaries do not have this. The giant tomes that come with the World Book Encyclopedia or the Britannica are usually terrific dictionaries for helping kids. I bought my dictionary used at the public library. Also, the Merriam-Webster dictionaries are good as well.

A thesaurus is also very useful for word study and is kind of fun when you play games with it. A good thesaurus to use is the Rogers Thesaurus. If you get a small pocket thesaurus, make sure that it has (at least) the phonetic pronunciation, antonyms, and of course it will have the synonyms. It would be very nice if it also tells the part of speech for the words, and has example sentences.

You also want to make certain the type is readable and not too dark and blurry to the eye. Children enjoy owning their own thesaurus, so it is good to look for nice small ones that you can afford to buy for each child.

Plan to do vocabulary at least 2 or 3 times a week.


Dictation
Dictation is a wonderful tool that homeschooling parents use for learning language. What it does is it mixes handwriting, spelling, grammar, punctuation, proof-reading, listening, and anything else that has to do with the language arts. You must always use high quality literature for your dictation so that your child will be exposed to good examples of writing as well as building a higher vocabulary in use.

Younger children can look at the book and copy the words themselves and then check it for any mistakes. Older children can also start out by copying; however, they will later switch to listening as you read the selection a sentence at a time. They will decide from hearing your voice about how to punctuate the words. Dictation is hard for anyone and you may encounter some serious complaints from your kids, but it is worth it.

There are writing and grammar lessons that can be taken after a dictation lesson. If the selection has a lot of adjectives, your children can learn what an adjective is and how to pick out the adjectives along with the nouns that the adjectives describe. You can have your child read the words out loud without the adjectives and then again with the adjectives.

Have your child compare the two to each other. For creative writing, you could have him change some of the adjectives for different ones as a fun activity. You can plan similar activities with nouns and verbs too. If you want to focus on the punctuation, try to pick selections that have plenty of punctuation such as quotation marks and commas.

Plan to do dictation as many times as you want each week. If you plan to use dictation as a way to teach grammar, then get a good college grammar reference book such as Harbrace or Warriner's.

Reading
Reading out loud should be a daily activity as well as reading quietly to yourself. Of course, during the school years, reading includes phonics instruction and learning the alphabet. Later on your child will read as a means of getting information, for textbook reading and reading for pleasure.

Reading for information purposes includes reading things like food labels, road signs, maps, newspapers, etc. Textbook reading would likely have to include learning some study skills, learning the vocabulary of the text book, speed reading, and more.

Reading for pleasure would include reading things like poetry, literature, thought provoking articles, and even comic books.

You will want to plan for your child to do plenty of reading every day. You should also plan to read out loud to your children every day. You must also listen to your child when he/she reads aloud because this will give him an opportunity or improve his reading and will give you an opportunity to help him with his pronunciation, tone, and rhythm. It can also help with easing the fear of public speaking.

Writing
If you are using a writing curriculum such as Writing Strands, Easy Writing, Wordsmith, etc. you are going to have to decide how many times a week that you are going to have a writing class and make your choices from there. Avoid over scheduling for writing because some children may need extra days for their lessons.

For example, each assignment in Writing Strands is spread out for a certain amount of days. If you plan this program in advance, you will have to skip several days between each assignment just in case your child needs extra days for study and review.

If you plan all of the writing classes in advance, like always, you want to use a pencil and leave plenty of days in between assignments. It may be better to plan one assignment at a time and write the lessons that you child completes in your planner as you go.

If you are going to design your own writing classes instead, you can plan one assignment for every two weeks or longer if necessary; which makes it a total of up to 16 assignments in all. This plan will give you 4 weeks of flexibility to work with, which could be just the thing you need to get your child up and running.



Handwriting

When your child is learning the alphabet it would be a good idea to also impress how necessary it is for him to form the letters well. This would likely add up to a short 5 minute class that doesnt pressure the child. There are a lot of good handwriting programs that you can get from libraries, bookstores, and online. All you have to do is decide which one to use and then stick with it.

You will want to plan to do handwriting on a daily basis until your child can remember how to form the letters and do it legibly. After you do that, you can have handwriting classes as they are needed and you will decide that based on how well your child is doing.

You will know that your child is doing well if:

the letters in the words that he writes are spaced just right (a pinky finger apart).
all of the short lower case letters are the same height.
all of the upper case letters and tall letters reach the top line.
his words are spaced properly.
the letters have a similar slant.
all of the letters are sitting on the line.

Make sure that you go gentle with the criticism of your childs writing. You must remember that there's a lot of time for your child to practice and become better at handwriting. I would recommend short classes. Fifteen minutes should be the most amount of time spent daily on it.