Once upon a time I believed that homeschooling, done well, required a significant financial investment. Private schools and the amount spent by the government on each public school student certainly suggest that education comes at a high price.
After a couple of years, however, I began to notice that my kids needed less and less in order to learn. A library card, favorite book titles purchased for our home collection, a stack of blank paper, and a few well-chosen resources here and there have done the job quite nicely thus far.
Have you made the same discovery? If you’re interested in saving your pennies while still helping those little minds grow, here are a few free and inexpensive educational resources you might not have heard of.
CurrClick
CurrClick was started by two homeschooling moms who thought ebooks and downloads would make for easy and affordable homeschooling. The website has over 800 free downloads available–including ebooks, games, and clubs.
Once you click on the “free” section, you can narrow your search by age range and subject to locate a resource on a specific topic. CurrClick also offers other inexpensive ebooks as well as live classes.
Educents
Educents is a recently launched daily deals site offering discounts of up to 90% off popular educational products. Founded by a family of educators and homeschoolers with a passion to make education more affordable, the staff at Educents feature high-quality, well-chosen deals.
The more users that sign up, the bigger the discounts the company is able to negotiate! Recent deals have included products from Green Kid Crafts, Houghton Mifflin, Reading Kingdom, and more.
Free Homeschool Deals
Homeschooling mom of six Jamerrill Stewart began Free Homeschool Deals as she was navigating her own way through homeschooling on a strict budget.
Each day she features homeschooling freebies from around the web: printables, Kindle ebooks, coupons and codes, and lapbooks. Jamerrill has also written a free ebook available for download: Homeschooling for free & frugal.
Khan Academy
I love Khan Academy’s mission: a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. They currently have over 4,000 videos posted in topics including math, biology, chemistry, physics, finance, and art history. It even has an SAT prep category.
Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially designed for viewing on a computer.
I imagine that as time goes by more and more inexpensive educational resources will come online, allowing us to invest our money wisely and take a vacation with the rest!
Is there a free educational resource you enjoy? Check out my Facebook thread to find more suggestions from other readers.
This post is sponsored by Educents.com.
I’ll have to check some of these out. I loved the Khan Academy. We were living with family for a few weeks when there were some school closures at my nephews’ schools. Since I’m a stay at home mom (with plans to start homeschooling my little one next year) I naturally was in charge of homeschooling them and keeping them caught up in their classes. Thanks to the Khan Academy and some attentive instruction I not only kept the oldest from falling any further behind in Algebra, but got him caught all the way up and he passed his semester final with flying colors. Although I’m not there to help anymore, he is still using the Khan Academy, and it is keeping him passing in that class. Wish someone still had the time I had to figure out the newest gaps and guide him to the right videos, but I’m still glad the Khan Academy has taken a student who struggled to pass, and is helping him consistently pass. The videos are incredibly well done, and when the time comes I will definitely be using them in our homeschool.
Teachers Pay Teachers is another one I’d highly recommend. It’s not all free, but they do have thousands of free printables and projects.
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We also use TPT. They have a lot of games for free and resources for free. I have used at least a dozen games from their site but never paid a single penny.
We have been using a full free math curriculum from India, downloadable on the web. It’s incredible and teaches to every kind of learner. My child had a lot of trouble with math and now he says math is his favorite thing to do. We’ve also learned a ton of cultural things about India through all the stories and word problems, plus we get to be familiar with the metric system with this series. I love the metric system. The series is made by the Indian government in a big push to standardize their national curriculum, similar to our Common Core but ever so much better!! I’m linking to the free textbooks on the web, and also a philosophical paper by the educators who developed the curriculum because I think it gives a great understanding of how math SHOULD be taught, and how we don’t teach it in this country. (Their grades seem different than ours – for instance we use the Class 3 book for US 2nd grade)
ncertbooks.prashanthellina.com/
http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/math.pdf
Jamie, thanks so much for including Free Homeschool Deals in your list! Here’s the link where families can sign-up for the free eBook Homeschooling for Free and Frugal if they’d like ~ http://www.freehomeschooldeals.com/free-ebook-homeschooling-for-free-frugal/
Jamerrill@ Free Homeschool Deals’s latest post: Free eBook: Shenanigans at Sugar Creek
You’re so welcome, Jamerrill. Nice to virtually “meet” you!
I love LOVE http://www.guesthollow.com. It’s a great site run by a homeschool mom. She has free curriculum for history and science. We’ve been using the history curriculum for almost 2 years, and plan to start up with her human body curriculum next year.
I also love the Wee Folk Art preschool curriculum.
I am so grateful for free homeschool sites! It is a wonderful help to new moms who are starting out their homeschooling journey and don’t have money to buy the “full kit” or curriculum, as well as a bonus for homeschool moms with several children with different learning styles.
Here’s another free site ~ Easy Peasy — All in One Homeschool for “a complete, free online Christian homeschool for your family and mine.”
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Jamie,
My daughter wants to know wher you got the cash-register like calculator in the picture accompanying this post.
Thank you!
Queen of chaos: How long till it took your son to learn the Algebra? I have a son who is definitely going to fail if he doesn’t get moving and I also recently found the Kahn academy and it seems so cool…I mean why go to school right? I wish these had been around when my kids were little then maybe I could have homeschooled.
My nephews’ schools were only closed for about three days at the end of their first semester. In that time, I gave him work at various levels of math, not just algebra. I looked for the gaps and then spent time finding the right videos on Kahn Academy. At first he was reluctant to do work “below him” (he prides himself on being the oldest and was bothered by doing similar work to his younger brother), but I explained why. Even though he had passed those classes, he hadn’t passed with 100% which meant there were gaps somewhere, and in order to progress further in math he needed to master those missing concepts. He went with it, and midway through day two was feeling the success of “getting it” with those old concepts. By the end of the weekend (so, five days then) he was completely caught up in his algebra class. After the first couple days if he was struggling, I’d help him figure out which part he was having trouble with and send him to look up the videos himself (and then check in obviously). He was incredibly proud of himself when he received a 104 on his semester final! (And so were the rest of us.) He’s not doing that well still, now that we’ve moved into our own home again, but he is still passing and using Kahn Academy and I always offer help when we do visit (and try to remind him to call me if he needs!).
Queen of Chaos’s latest post: We’re home!
I love http://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org/ which is a lot like educents that you mentioned. They has excellent deals!
Also here are a few sites of homeschool moms that offer free or affordable curriculum. Awesome!
Homeschool creations.com
Confessionsofahomeschooler.com
http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/
There are several others but these popped into my mind first. We also love Easy Peasy Homeschool mentioned above 🙂
Great post, I actually have visited each and everyone of these as I started out looking for as much as I could find for free or at very reduced prices since we could afford to purchase curriculum and found that I can make changes to these pieces to reflect his interest in other things and that helps keep his interest in boring things like history etc.
I am trying to convince my husband that homeschooling is a good thing, and a viable option for our kids. My son will be in first grade next year, and I am hoping my husband will agree to a trial run this summer. We will try it and see if it works for me, my son, our family and his learning. I am a little overwhelmed a the thought, and really want it to go well so that my husband will see the merits of homeschooling. Any tips for a pseudo-curriculum we could use, how to implement and what I should focus on for the trial run? I can’t spend a lot of money on the test, but want to have something to “go by”.
Thanks in advance.
I do believe that education is not limited to classroom instruction alone. Home schooling is proof of that and I am glad that there are various free resources out there that can help both students and parents. Thank you for posting this. I do believe that greater learning happens when a child have access to technology and instructional materials. It will also give them the reign to choose what they want to learn.
There is also Homeschool Freebie of the Day at http://www.homeschoolfreebie.wholesomechildhood.com/. I have gotten tons of great, free resources from them!