Lesson 4: Lesson Planning
Finding Ready-Made Lesson Plans Online
The internet has made lesson planning so much easier. Thousands of lesson plans are available on the net on almost any subject you can imagine. Of course, there is work involved in the process. You must find lessons for the subject material you want to cover, and for the age and abilities of your child. Then you must adapt them to your child’s special needs. The greater the need, the more adaptations will be needed. However, having someone else create the basic structure can still save a tremendous amount of time and money.
It is essential that the do-it-yourself homeschooling parent learn to be an expert searcher. In this section, we will learn to search using Google. Open Google in another window. To do this, you will click on the link that follows using your right mouse button. You will see a list of options. (When you can’t figure out how to do something, click using the right mouse button and see what happens. Different options appear based on where you are clicking.) This is called right-clicking. Right-click this link: Google
Because search engines are regularly updated, I can’t tell you exactly what you will find when you type in a certain term. However, you will be able to see, through the following exercises, that typing the correct term will help to improve your accuracy. In the box on the site, type the phrase lesson plans and see what you find. I got 1,810,000 links. (Look in the blue bar across the top of the page to see how many links you got. Some will be duplicates. Many will be junk. You will, however, see some very large lesson plan pages, so take some time and research them later on. They are often reliable sources of materials.
Let’s see if we can get more specific. Try typing in lesson plans dinosaurs. This time, we only found about 32,000 pages. That’s better, and most seem to be about dinosaurs. Not all the sites are lesson plan sites. Some are dinosaur pages, but that is fine. You can pull information from these and your children may like some of them.
However, let’s imagine for a moment that your child doesn’t read well. Try typing in lesson plans dinosaurs "learning disabled." (Putting a term in quotation marks tells the program to search for the exact term.) There aren’t many links, but I don’t like what I find. They are mostly about school programs. So, I try again. As you can see, getting just what you want is a matter of trial and error. Trying "learning disabled" dinosaurs doesn’t get me anything more targeted either. I decide to go back to my second choice. Lesson plans Dinosaurs. This time, after getting the results, I scroll to the bottom of the page. In the area for typing, you see that you can search within results. This means that you can erase the terms you put in, add a new one, and search only the sites already found in the previous search for those that also contain that term. Try this. Click on the link to search within results. Choose a search term to add to your search.
You find that there are few lesson plans specifically designed for children with disabilities. Generally, you will want to seek regular lesson plans and alter them, a process that will be covered in the following section. For now, practice searching for lesson plans and begin a favorites file of large sites that appeal to you.
In preparation for the following lessons, select a topic you would like to create a unit study about. Use this topic as you complete the sections and assignments.
Be sure to check the resource list for links to some of the best lesson plan sites.
