Homeschooling Online - Developing Your Math Lesson Plans
Obviously, as a homeschooling parent, you are going to be teaching and introducing your children to several different subjects. Not surprisingly, this fact alone can frighten many parents. Fortunately, most good curriculums will provide the needed information and teacher books that will help guide you through this endeavor.
As for the different subjects that a parent has to teach, probably none is a intimidating as mathematics. Parents who are not comfortable with numbers or who had a difficult time themselves might tend to want to avoid any serious discussion of math lesson plans. Hopefully the advice that follows will help reduce some of the fear that math can bring.
The fact of the matter is that some things, including math, shouldn’t be scheduled too far in advance. Fortunately almost all math curriculums are pretty much laid out for you in your math preparation kits.
If your child did lesson one yesterday, then today your child will do lesson two, unless your child had a problem with lesson one and needs a review. This is why you should not schedule math far in advance. Math is always a harder subject to learn and therefore can’t be pre-planned.
No one ever knows ahead of time which day will require some math review instead of a math lesson. If you need to schedule an entire week of math at a time, be sure to use a pencil to write the schedule in case you have to erase later.
You have to plan ahead for Math Lab if you offer this type of program. Math lab entails hands-on activities that use objects like beads, Lego’s, money, or even a trip to the grocery store as teaching aids. The week before math lab day, you will want to look over the upcoming week or the previous month in your child’s math book to see what skills you can reinforce with hands on activities and make your plan work better for you both.
You are going to want to take plenty of time for math. In the middle thru upper grades, it could take as much as 2 hours to complete a math lesson - even longer if the child is finding it hard to learn. If your children appears to be taking a huge amount of time for math, it could be that they have not memorized the basic math facts that are needed to advance.
Depending on their age or grade, children should know instantly the answers to basic math facts such as times tables. It is well worth their time to do a drill sheet daily until these facts are memorized. Mid-term forth graders shouldn’t be adding with their fingers because it will slow them down as they learn multiplication and division.
Graduating fifth graders should have complete knowledge and understanding of all four basic facts for math including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. If your 4th grader can’t answer right away what 8+9 or 19-6 equals, then you will need to start doing a grade-appropriate fact sheet before every math lesson for review sessions.
But, if you do not want to do the drill sheets, another way that you can help them learn is to let the child look at either an addition chart or a multiplication chart while they do math lessons. This way, they learn the basics over time and will eventually not need the charts in the future.
Homeschooling Online