Tag Archives: home school

10 Steps to Developing a Quality Lesson Plan

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This guide is not meant to be the one and only way to develop a lesson plan; however, it is going to provide you with at least some good methods to start with. A general overview highlights the key points of creating a useful and working lesson plan.

Below is a list of the steps that are usually involved in developing a quality lesson plan as well as a description of what each component should be. They will be listed in 10 of the best points.

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 also need to be aware of what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for. Record a time estimate for your lesson plan to help you to better budget your time.

Once you have chosen your topic, you can begin choosing how you want to teach the topic in general. If you didn’t 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 fulfill.

Having your lesson plan properly set up with state standards, helps to prove its worthiness and necessity later. It also helps to assuring that your students are being taught what the state requires.

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

2. Develop clear, specific objectives to be sure that your lesson plan will teach exactly what you want it to. 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, the objective may be that “the students will know how to add 1 + 3” or more specifically “the students will demonstrate how to add 1 + 3.”

Your objectives should also be directly measurable. What this means is that you need to make sure that you will be able to tell whether these objectives were met or not. 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, in order for you to gain familiarity with adding two numbers together.

The specific objectives would be more like the one listed above, in such a manner, as “the students will demonstrate how to add the numbers 2 and 3 together.”

Who Said Homeschool Is For Kids Only? It's For Highschools Too!

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They say homeschooling is only for the younger kids in the elementary or lower levels but highschool homeschooling is also a very popular educational choice. Only this time, the decisions are most probably through the convincing power of the students themselves.

Most that do homeschooling are those teenagers who cannot take the pressures at school, especially those of peer pressure and bullying. Others cannot catch up with the lessons and curriculum programs of regular schools or would like to start early in life through training, internship and community volunteering jobs that would help them be knowledgeable and prepared for the struggle outside the four walls of their school.

This is why choosing the suitable curriculum for teenagers or highschool is very important. There are a lot of materials or support they can get especially on the Internet. They can talk to other homeschoolers in established groups through message boards, forums and chats to build a network. Homeschooling sites are also all over the net; they can browse through these sites, find an established support group in their area, get some catalogs and enroll in a curriculum or they can create their own study program.

This is good for those students who have very supportive and open-minded parents. But in case there are none and the student is left to carry out his curriculum by himself, homeschooling helps students to stand up and depend on themselves because one thing that is developed within is good independent study skills and more as they engage in continuous studying on their own.

In choosing the homeschool curricula, it is best if teenagers are present and take an active part in deciding which curricula to choose that would best apply to their learning styles and abilities. Better for teenagers is to create their own course of study. In this way, students will have good choices of activities which develop every aspect of their personality instead of just choosing a fixed program. Anyway, there are different approaches to choose from and combine that would help in the holistic development of the student.

For highschool, homeschooling can help them start in life, make a step forward through practical trainings and internship programs depending on the specialization they like to pursue. Computer based jobs like developing software, designing a web, database administration, graphics and multimedia designs, repairs and troubleshooting are very popular among the choices of training and specialization. These are the jobs that most students who hate school like the most.

So, why force them in fixed school curricula when they can actually be successful in what they want and might do best in the future.

Why Do People Home School Their Children?

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Of course in America there are many options to educating our children. There are public schools, private schools, charter schools, Montessori schools and, of course, the option of home schooling. There are advocates of both home schooling and public schooling. Those of us who don’t home school, which is still the majority of Americans, need to fully understand the reasons why people choose to home school their children.

Religious or Philosophical Convictions:

Religion is not permitted in the public schools. Many families feel that religion needs to be a larger part of their child’s education than that which the public schools allow.

People who have deep religious beliefs show great passion. These are the individuals who are passionate about their children’s education and feel that only they are able to teach them to the best of their ability and the content that they feel they should be learning. The home schooling parent is in charge, they call the shots and they like it that way.

Socialization:

Some people that don’t understand home schooling believe that it is confining rather than socializing. But those individuals that believe that are stuck in thinking about the stereotypical socialization of an age-based classroom. Children that are home schooled are exposed to social situations in a mixed age range. They have “age-mates” instead of “class-mates”.

Many home schoolers feel that their children need to be exposed to the appropriate ways to behave not inappropriate. They feel that their child should be exposed to the model behavior of people who have learned to make decisions and handle themselves in various social settings. By being exposed to appropriate modeling of social behavior, home-schooled children will learn how to act appropriately.

Parents of home schooled children can also see when their child “gets-it” when they model for a younger child appropriate behavior.

Home-schooled children get a reality based social lesson. On a daily basis they see adults they know, love and trust manage and balance life day to day. Modeled for them is academics balanced with real life chores; caring for a sick friend or neighbor, shoveling the driveway and walkway, doing the grocery shopping and dropping of the dry cleaning, cooking dinner while folding laundry, putting laundry away and talking on the phone with Aunt Sara. These are real life situations that home schoolers are exposed to and public school children are often sheltered from or are privy to a controlled school environment.

Academics:

Home schoolers have several advantages over publicly schooled children. The curriculum is designed specifically for them – not for children their age and what children at a particular age are expected to know and learn. Public schools differentiate instruction the best they can. However, a home-schooled child has a curriculum tailored to their needs. They may read at a 4 th grade level, spell at a 3 rd grade level and complete math at a 6 th grade level.

A home-schooled child is neither rushed nor not given enough time. There are no other children to “keep busy” so they are free to work at their pace and move as quickly or as slowly as need be.

Much research has been done on how children learn best. A home-schooled child is not only taught by the person who knows them best in the entire world but also since they are the only student, the learning style never has to be varied. If a student learns best through music, then the curriculum of a home-schooled child can be tailored to meet their needs so they will be more successful.

Home-schooled children get to spend more quality time as a family. They are not trapped in a traditional school setting for 6 hours a day but are free to spend quality time as a family every day.

It is said that parents are a child’s first teacher. Families that home school want to continue to be their child’s teacher because they feel that their children need the guidance of their family and God and not the guidance of someone hired to do a job that is naturally theirs from the day their child was born.