Lesson Planning

By Kim Baumgaertel

As I write this, it is mid-August.  My Mommy-teacher friends and I rendezvous almost every evening at the soccer field to sit in our lawn chairs in the late summer sunshine and chat.  How was your summer . . .did you travel . . . the blackberries are ripening . . . Slowly, cautiously, and with tentative dread, our conversations turn to curriculum, schedules, band instruments, and SCHOOL.  We are collectively in denial.  No more spending hours in the garden.  No more lazy picnics at the lake.  No more frappes at Starbucks on a whim.  No more quilting, painting the bathroom, organizing the filing cabinets, picking bouquets, sewing skirts, sleeping in, walking the beach.  No.  We are stealing ourselves for the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.  We begin to discuss, to plan, to chart our courses for the year. 

            I am a lesson planner.  I love to sit at my desk with my plan book, perusing through textbooks and scheduling pages to be read and chapters to finish.  If I have to wait for the oil to be changed on the mini-van I take my plan book.  If I am sitting at the dentist’s, I have my plan book.  When I really should be cleaning out the refrigerator or ironing clothes, I am writing in my plan book!  This passion is both a blessing and a blight.

            When I first began home schooling in 1989, I was still brainwashed by my teacher training courses in college.  I had taught junior high school language arts at a “Christian” school in our town for a number of years before Jim and I had our first child.  My plans at that time were to raise our kids and then return to teaching when they started kindergarten.  The Lord convinced us by the time our second child was born that we take control of their education. 

You have probably heard of the saying “do you home school, or do school at home?” referring to how home educators tend to turn their homes into a little classroom modeled after whatever they perceive school to be.  That was me.  I was a hyper-planner, a sit ‘em at their desks and work until lunchtime Mommy-teacher. Fellow home schoolers who visited my home during school time were intimidated by the sight of my four little children working industriously at their desks and me sitting nobly at mine.  Many years have gone by and I have slackened the school-at-home thing considerably, but I am still an advocate of the good ‘ol plan book!

            At the beginning of a school year I like to take a day or two for myself as a Mommy-teacher in-service day.  I gather all of the kids’ books; spread them before me on the picnic table and start looking them over. I want to get an idea of what lies ahead of us for the school year; conquests of continents by marauding bands of Huns, taxonomy of living things according to the Biological classification system, division of polynomials, parsing complex sentences, Beowulf.  This part is fun. 

            Next I begin to map out the year, subject by subject. Math is easiest because the lessons are already numbered and you are safe in assuming that your child should do one lesson a day.  I look at how many math lessons my kids need to work through to finish the book by the end of May, calculate in the tests, and write up a schedule for the first week.  Now, what usually happens is that one or all of my kids will inform me that they already know the contents of the first three or five or eleven lessons of their math text because it’s review.  No kidding.  This is when I have to do some evaluating to see if they are seriously capable of skipping those lessons, or if they need the review.  I usually have them work a few representative problems in each lesson and go from there.

            For subjects that aren’t so cut and dried as arithmetic, you can do essentially the same type of planning.  Peruse the text, noting how many chapters or sections or pages you have to cover in your allotted time. (Now, I actually know home schooling families who, believe it or not, home school all through the summer!  If you are one of those families, I salute you.  I need my summer off!)  You may want to have your student spend half the year on history and the other half on science.  This works well.  Or, you may decide to work on both subjects throughout the entire year, but not do both subjects on the same day.  At any rate, get a good idea of the amount of text you need to cover and pace your students through the year.

I have always encouraged fellow home educators to take lesson planning seriously. Planning lessons the weekend before a school week begins is a means of keeping yourself accountable, adding some structure to your day, and giving your children a sense of the seriousness of their education.  Your plan book serves as a journal of progress made and a record of advancement for any authority that may question your legitimacy as a home educator.  And, perhaps best of all, it is your overseer, your watchdog, your supervisor. 

Email Kim with comments or questions

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