The purpose of this blog is to develop lesson plans for my homeschool co-op. I intend to use it to keep track and share unit studies. I'd also like develop a couple of ideas for religious education.
The first part of developing any lesson plan or unit study is deciding what you want your student to learn. After establishing learning objectives, the teacher has to figure how the best way to get there! In a lesson plan, there needs to be lots of repetition and review. Then, some kind of assessment is important. Teaching is a step out in faith that kids will benefit. It can be very disheartening to put your whole heart into a lesson and later find out that there's little recall of the material you presented.
I like six week units, and since fortunately our homeschool co-op is designed to function on six week units, that's the format I shall use.
In the past, I've taught unit studies on art appreciation, music history, a class I entitled "Fine Arts Cafe" that combined art, music and a snack around a theme, Indiana history, Building Big (based on the pbs program), The Physics of Toys, writing workshop based on the EIW program, Little House on the Praire, and my favorite unit study on Indiana History.
I've also taught Religious Education, occasional classes here and there for different homeschool or parish programs. I believe that God has given me a gift of teaching, esp. developing ideas, and I love to use it.
I put a lot of time into developing my lessons--usually, I only teach them for one session, so I'd like to share them.
