Thursday, April 29, 2010

TOS Crew: Lesson Planet


Our next stop on the Homeschool Crew voyage, is to another planet.. Lesson Planet that is. As part of the crew, we were givin free access to a member account on Lesson Planet, in exchange for our honest opinion.

So let's start with the basics, what exactly is Lesson Planet.
Lesson Planet is a website that makes it easy for teachers and parents to search over 225,000 online lesson plans and worksheets that have been reviewed and rated by teachers.

With Lesson Planet you have the ability to search both lesson plans and worksheets on any subject, from Art to Science and everything in between.
They also give you options to narrow your search by grade, and teacher ratings.

You can watch a quick one minute tutorial on how to use lesson planet by clicking here.

Judging by the time I spent on Lesson Planet, it appears to have been designed for the classroom teacher. At this stage in my school year, I am not creating a unit study, or planning for the new year at this very moment. So I did not have a project in mind as I searched. So, I first started by searching very general topics, such as; Math, Language, etc.. and then narrowed them down based on the results I would get. I found a few things that were useful.  However, I had to sift through many websites before I found something that would be useful in my homeschool.

Many times, the results were on Company websites, and the lesson plans were to accompany their books, books that I do not own. Or they are from a school district, and the names of the books used were not listed. Within in those, there were at times links to other pages that may have some useful information.  For example, while clicking through the links I was able to find some math worksheets to use for a student in my homeschool group. However, I had been researching for about 15 minutes before I came across something useful.

I also did searches on some specific topics; gardening, the civil war, civil rights, astronomy, etc.. While there were some interesting things along my journey. However, what I found was not always relevant to my homeschool. And each search took a good chunk of my time.

This is not a service, that I think that I would pay for, for our homeschool, however, what is good about Lesson Planet, is they are offering a 10 day free trial. I would recommend that you sign up for the free 10 day trial and check it out for yourself. It very well may be a perfect fit for your homeschool style!  If it is you can become a member for $39.95 per year.

Please visit the crew blog, to see what my crew mates are saying about Lesson Planet.






No comments:

Post a Comment