Lesson Planet – TOS review

Company:  Lesson Planet

Product:  Lesson Planet:  The search engine for Teachers

Cost:  $39.95 for a year subscription

I received a three month trial subscription to Lesson Planet as part of the TOS crew.   I am always looking for things through Google and Yahoo for school.  The problem with this is that I have to sort through all of the odd responses I get when I am looking for a certain subject.  We love to do unit studies in our family.  When we decide on a topic, the first thing I usually do is search the internet for ideas on worksheets, books to read, and lesson plans.  I love finding lesson plans that others have used.  This cuts my planning time down immensely. 

My thoughts when I first saw this was that Lesson Planet could help alleviate the frustration of sorting through the mess I usually get when trying to find school related articles and ideas.  There are over 225,000 lesson plans and worksheets to choose from.  

One of the things I  like about Lesson Planet is that I only have to search one place and can find  a lesson plan or worksheet on just about any idea I can come up with.   Just like any curriculum, I liked some of the lesson plans and some really didn’t interest me for a variety of reasons.   A lot of them were geared toward classrooms and adapting them to a homeschool environment would take more time than I was willing to spend.  I did like that the lesson plans are rated 1 to 5 by teachers using them. 

The subjects you can choose from include Art & Music, Health & Nutrition, Geography, Research Resources, Social Studies, Education, Language Arts, Math, and Science & Technology.

I am starting to plan our school year for next year and one of the topics I have been looking into is American History.  So, I entered this into the search feature of Lesson Planet and it gave me over 14,000 lesson plans and 443 worksheets.  Jeopardy, American History style, American History Storytelling and American who stood up for their beliefs were the first three that came up.  Although I found a lot of dead links there was still a huge variety of things to choose from.   In fact, it was a little overwhelming. 

So, what did I think of Lesson Planet?  For me it was pretty much like using Google or any other search engine.  It did help get rid of sites that just had the words in them but had nothing to do with the overall topic.   One thing I didn’t like was that a lot of the links went to sites that I had to sign up for.  The price of $39.95 for a year’s seems a little high for something you can get for free by using any search engine.   School teachers and people who prefer more structured lesson plans may benefit from this more than our family did. 

The website is easy to navigate and fairly user friendly.   You can choose by grade, subject, and topic which does help alleviate some things you don’t need. 

You can try this out for yourself because Lesson Planet offers a free 10 day trial available here.

To read what the other  Crew Members had to say, please click here.

Thank you to TOS and Lesson Planet for the opportunity to review this product.  I was given a 3 month subscription in exchange for my honest opinion in this review.   No other compensation was provided.