Having received a free 3 month access, I was asked to review Lesson Planet as part of the TOS Homeschool Crew. Lesson Planet is a subscription based website where you will find over 225,000 online lesson plans and worksheets that have been reviewed by teachers. You can get a free 10 day trial of their website and then if you choose to join you can subscribe each year for $39.95.

What you will find is that you can search their website by various categories such as grade level, subject, and topic to find what might interest you. These items are not on their website but you will be directed to them from the Lesson Planet search engine. Each item is also given a star rating of 1 to 5 by teachers. For example, you can search for either lesson plans or worksheets based on a topic like astronomy or frogs. You can pull up items by subject such as English. You can also limit what comes back by grade level.

What I liked was that, from this one location, it was easy to search based on the various categories in order for me to find different lesson plans and worksheets for me to use in our homeschooling. Each item has been reviewed by teachers and has been provided with a rating so I know whether someone else has found it useful. If you were a homeschooler looking for various materials and ideas this would be a good place to start your search.

For me though, I have to be honest to say that I found most of the lessons were geared toward a classroom rather than for a small group of children. The lessons also are written with a teacher in mind so most of it was not very useful for the homeschooling methods of our household. I did find some worksheets that were helpful but for the most part it took me too long to find things I could use and adapt to our homeschool style. Another thing to bear in mind was since there were a lot of items that not all can have their links confirmed and I found several to be broken links when I was searching for items.

However, just because it was not something that I found to be useful in my homeschooling, does not mean it may not be a good fit for you. I suggest trying out the website for a free 10 day trial and see for yourself. Also please check out what my fellow homeschool crew members said about Lesson Planet here on our homeschool blog.

Filed under: Home, TOS Crew by Barbara
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