how do you plan the lessons or instruction?
I’ve found that the hardest part is sorting through all of the possible resources (since there are so many of them) to find the best fit for you and your child. In my experience, once you’ve found a good fit, the lesson/instruction tends to plan itself.
Be sure to check out the books by Michael Clay Thompson for Language Arts and the books by Beast Academy / Art of Problem Solving for math. We have found both series amazing for DS8. I don’t plan a specific lesson in these subjects for each day. We just start where we left off and continue until we reach a natural break in the material.
We use K12 for science (middle school Physical Sciences) and history. The K12 curriculum is divided into lessons, so we do one lesson a day, three days a week. Sometimes we complete a lesson in 20 minutes; other times we may spend an hour or more depending on how interested he is in the topic and how long we spend experimenting or looking at additional resources such as BrainPop, YouTube Channels (e.g., Crash Course and Veritasium), and Khan Academy.
There are homeschoolers with less structure, including those that use no formal curriculum, and those with a lot of structure that use a single online school or program with a formal curriculum for everything. You need to find what works best for your family and run with it, but knowing that a few weeks or months down the road you may try something else completely different!
