Homeschool Lesson Plans Made Simple

Posted by Candace Wrighting

April 9, 2008

by Kayley Kenzie

Using theme-based learning is a great and fun way to homeschool your child. You and your child can brainstorm a theme from any topic that your child is interested in.

Young children might prefer themes around things like apples, the zoo, birds, stars, or a favorite author. Whenever you tailor your homeschool lesson plans around a theme, learning becomes a lot more fun and creative.

When basing your homeschool lesson plans around a thematic unit, you will want to decide how much time you will need to cover that specific theme.

Depending on how deep you want your child to learn the content, you could spend a week to a month. I suggest only spending two weeks on one theme.

It’s not difficult to integrate themes into homeschool lesson plans. You’ll also come to realize just how much fun you and your child are having by learning so much through a particular theme.

You don’t necessarily need to integrate every single subject into the thematic unit. You don’t even need to do theme-based learning all of the time with your homeschool lesson plans.

One of the most important things you can do is involve your child in planning the themes. Let you child have some freedom in choosing themes for the lessons.

You’ll enhance your children’s interest in the lessons when you involve them and give them choices. I think it’s very important to get your child involved as much as possible in all aspects of lesson planning and preparation.

Let’s go over an example as to how you would build on themes in your homeschooling lesson plans. Take, for example, using apples for your thematic unit. You could have a lesson on how apples grow as part of a science lesson.

You could slice up an apple into sections to do fractions. You could make Johnny Appleseed the focus for a lesson in Social Studies. You could read books about apples or have your child write a paragraph about apples for Language Arts.

But there’s more: We could turn those apple slices we used in the math lesson to create apple stamps for our art lesson. We could sing songs about apples. We could finish off with a cooking lesson and make apple bread or apple sauce.

The essential thing to remember when using theme-based homeschool lesson plans is to integrate some of your child’s interests. Using thematic units as an addition to the curriculum that you have already planned can help make learning more enjoyable.

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