For the novice homeschooling parent, one of the most intimidating steps in the whole process is the idea of developing a lesson plan that is both effective and manageable. Fortunately, this does not have to be hard. The important thing to remember is that your child should be the main focus and you should do what is in the best interest of the child. For those choosing to do it on their own, this article will briefly outline nine steps to developing a quality lesson plan.

Step 1 The first thing that you will have to consider, obviously, is what you will be teaching. This, in large part, should be based upon your state or local school standards. In addition, you will also need to be aware of what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for and record a reasonable time estimate for your lesson plan.

Step 2 You will need to develop clear and specific objectives for the lesson plan from the beginning. However, you must note that these objectives should not be activities used in the lesson plan. Instead, they should be the specific learning outcomes of those activities.

For example, if you wanted to teach your child how to add 1 + 3, your defined objective may be that "the student will learn to demonstrate how to add 1 + 3."

Your objectives should also be measurable. What this means is that you need to make sure that you will be able to tell specifically whether the defined objectives were met or not. Keep in mind that you can certainly have more than one objective for a lesson plan if you feel that this would be more beneficial.

Step 3 You should show, as early as possible in your lesson plan, what materials you are going to use. Be specific in this case so that you can make sure another teacher will have everything that they could possibly need in the event that you, the parent, choose not to teach yourself.

Step 4 It is highly suggested that you write out an anticipatory activity as a way to lead into the main lesson plan. This will help develop the student's interest in learning what you are getting ready to teach.

Step 5 At this point you need to write the step-by-step procedures that will be performed to reach each of the above-mentioned objectives. These don't have to involve every little thing that the teacher will say and do but, they should list the relevant actions that the teacher needs in order to perform them.

Step 6 After all of the outlined procedures have been completed, you may want to provide your students with time for independent practice. This step will help to reinforce the main concepts and lessons learned. In addition, it will help the students determine for themselves what additional information they may need to fully comprehend the material.

Step 7 Before you start moving to the assessment phase of your homeschooling lesson plan, you should be prepared to create some sort of closure for the lesson plan. A good idea for this part of the process is to return to your anticipatory set discussed earlier. It is at this point that your children can ask for additional information or clarification on the main lesson points. After having gone through the lesson, you can return to the introduction exercise and ask how things may have changed given what they have just learned.

Step 8 For this step, it is a good idea to include a "connection" section, which clearly shows how the lesson plan could be integrated with other subjects. This builds on step 7 and by putting a lot of work into it, you can really help to develop complete thematic units that help integrate related topics into many different subjects.

Step 9 In this step, you will want to write your assessment and evaluation. In reality, many lesson plans don't really need them. However, they are helpful and most of them should have some sort of evaluation as to whether or not the objectives were met.

The key to doing this is to make sure that the assessment specifically measures whether the objectives were reached or not. As a result of this step, there should be a direct correlation between the defined objectives and the evaluation assessments.

That's really all there is to creating a lesson plan! If you follow the steps as outlined here, you are on your way to writing a very thorough lesson plan that will be useful for you regardless of the subject that you may be teaching.