Lesson Planning
How to Plan
After familiarizing yourself with the reading list for a given course, visit the Lesson Plans page at Donna Young's invaluable site.
On this page you will find a wealth of forms in .pdf and Word .doc formats to print out and use. I'm really not exaggerating when I say that these forms taught me how to plan a course of study -- I had to see the form to visualize the breakdown of reading lists and other learning activities. Donna also offers helpful strategies for developing lesson plans.
For example, you might choose a grid-style plan, with boxes -- this is what I'm using for my rising 8th grader's work this coming year. Using the 5x6 grid, I'm planning six-week blocks of reading and other work for five subject areas. In his case, I'm breaking his work into reading, writing, math, language, and logic, with both "reading" and "writing" encompassing a host of subjects including history, geography, science, and literature.
Each box in the grid represents a week's worth of work in a given subject area. In the box, I list each book to be read that week, with chapters or pages to be covered. I continue listing the book week by week until that book is finished, then I start another. A book with twenty chapters would take four weeks to finish, assuming he's reading a chapter a day five days a week.
For this program, you could designate a column on the grid (a vertical row of boxes) for historical background ; one for primary-source material; one for literature; one for art/music/culture resources; and one for writing assignments.
Then you choose your readings and plug them into the form. There's more here than anyone could read in a year, I think, but the idea is for you to customize readings to suit you and your student.
Techno-Option: I haven't tried this yet, but if your child has access to a computer for schoolwork, one way to manage readings and other activities might be to use the Evernote download. You can use the Web Clipper function to "clip" web pages with readings and other items and arrange them in "notebooks" for your student to work through. I'm currently using the free version of Evernote for lesson planning, First Holy Communion planning, recipes, and other needs; it fills up quickly, but I'm not ready yet to go to the paid-subscription version. Anyway, something to try.
After familiarizing yourself with the reading list for a given course, visit the Lesson Plans page at Donna Young's invaluable site.
On this page you will find a wealth of forms in .pdf and Word .doc formats to print out and use. I'm really not exaggerating when I say that these forms taught me how to plan a course of study -- I had to see the form to visualize the breakdown of reading lists and other learning activities. Donna also offers helpful strategies for developing lesson plans.
For example, you might choose a grid-style plan, with boxes -- this is what I'm using for my rising 8th grader's work this coming year. Using the 5x6 grid, I'm planning six-week blocks of reading and other work for five subject areas. In his case, I'm breaking his work into reading, writing, math, language, and logic, with both "reading" and "writing" encompassing a host of subjects including history, geography, science, and literature.
Each box in the grid represents a week's worth of work in a given subject area. In the box, I list each book to be read that week, with chapters or pages to be covered. I continue listing the book week by week until that book is finished, then I start another. A book with twenty chapters would take four weeks to finish, assuming he's reading a chapter a day five days a week.
For this program, you could designate a column on the grid (a vertical row of boxes) for historical background ; one for primary-source material; one for literature; one for art/music/culture resources; and one for writing assignments.
Then you choose your readings and plug them into the form. There's more here than anyone could read in a year, I think, but the idea is for you to customize readings to suit you and your student.
Techno-Option: I haven't tried this yet, but if your child has access to a computer for schoolwork, one way to manage readings and other activities might be to use the Evernote download. You can use the Web Clipper function to "clip" web pages with readings and other items and arrange them in "notebooks" for your student to work through. I'm currently using the free version of Evernote for lesson planning, First Holy Communion planning, recipes, and other needs; it fills up quickly, but I'm not ready yet to go to the paid-subscription version. Anyway, something to try.
