Save Time and Stay Sane with Lesson Plans

Creating Lesson Plans

Lesson plans are a great way to create a list of all the assignments, activities, or projects required in a course. These lesson plans can be used over and over by multiple students and are not tied to a specific schedule. That means you can create a detailed lesson plan for an entire course, and use it for all of your students when they reach that level!

Additionally, you can share lesson plans with other Homeschool Tracker users - perfect for co-ops or to save data-entry time when using the same curriculum! Let's start by learning how to create our own lesson plans as well as import shared plans.

Scheduling Lesson Plan Items

Now that you have a lesson plan, how do you schedule those items on your student's agenda? Watch this video for a quick run through of the scheduler tool.

Using Presets to Speed Up Scheduling

You can also set up "presets" that will greatly speed up your scheduling each week.  Presets are blocks of time that you reserve for a specific course.  If you use presets when scheduling, Homeschool Tracker will automatically schedule your assignments at your preset time each week.

Strategies for Staying Sane

Many long-time Homeschool Tracker users swear by creating their lesson plans for the entire year, then scheduling just one or two weeks at a time. I definitely recommend this approach, as it allows you to get ahead by planning out your lessons during the summer, but also limits the need to reschedule during the year if you get behind for any reason.

Scheduling the entire year at once can result in quite the rescheduling headache if you need to move hundreds (or even thousands) of assignments forward a few days.

Do you have any lesson planning or scheduling strategies that have worked well in your Homeschool? Feel free to leave them in a comment below!