Lesson Plans, Curriculum, Educational Goals Explained

You might find yourself confused by terms such as Lesson Plans or Curriculum. Sometimes educational terms can be as confusing as legal terms. However, your Lesson Plan can be as simple as jotting down ideas and activities for learning this coming week. And your Curriculum can include the Educational Goals and Objectives for your children.

Here’s a few examples of a Curriculum and Lesson Plans: Your Science Curriculum for this coming year could include goals for your child to learn about Earth Science (earth’s composition, volcanoes, earthquakes, planets); Life Science (plants, animals, insects, humans); or Physical Science (magnetism, energy, motion, matter).

Educational Goals and Objectives for Earth Science could be: Learning the different layers of the earth; collecting and identifying rocks; learning the different types of clouds and their impact on earth's atmosphere; creating a miniature water cycle in your backyard; experimenting with erosion in your backyard; constructing an erupting volcano; plus reading and discussing books, articles, and photos on each of these topics/experiments.

Lesson Plans for these Earth Science topics could be: Creating an actual model showing earth’s layers; reading Rocks and Minerals and labeling various rocks collected; making a colorful display showing cloud types and tracking a week’s worth of cloud types and precipitation in your area; photographing the mini water cycle experiment and recording descriptions of how and why it works; recording the erosion experiment, then researching and describing the impact of larger-scale erosion on earth, river banks, seashores; reading Volcanoes and Earthquakes and discussing why, how, and where volcanoes erupt, plus constructing a volcano and recording its eruption.

In Conjunction with these Lesson Plans and Activities, children can describe each of the lessons and experiments in their own words, explaining what they learned, or describe the activities in writing or by drawing illustrations of the experiments. They could display their illustrations or photos of this week’s lessons and activities on a bulletin board, or do a few worksheets on these topics to add to their portfolio. And, always, they can be encouraged to pursue topics branching off from the lessons and activities they’ve done.

This Easy-to-Follow Format will help you create Educational Goals for your children, plus Lessons Plans on topics and subjects to support your goals, as you follow your Curriculum, which simply describes your Educational Goals, Objectives, Lesson Plans, and Learning Activities.

Many more examples are on our website at EverythingHomeschooling.com.

Happy Homeschooling!