If you are just starting out with homeschooling, or tired of spending so much money on curriculum and supplies so you can teach your kids at home, then you are going to love my list of top 8 free homeschooling resources!
1. Free Homeschooling Calendar
First thing you need is a calendar to print out. Here are calendars and planners for your homeschooling year. Get it here.
2. Free Homeschooling Attendance Sheets
Next you need attendance sheets. You can simply start with a blank piece of paper, or you can go purchase a very nice homeschool planner. But this is a great free option for you to use.
3. Free Classic Books & Textbooks, Movies, Software, and More
If you are like me, free books are wonderful. If you like a book you can hold, the library is your best bet. But if you are fine with e-books, there is a wonderful place online called the Internet Archive with scans of pretty much any book every written (or at least it feels that way!) You can find books on every subject and stories from all the great classic authors in PDF, kindle, and other e-reader formats. Libraries from around the world come together and share these books and make them available to you free! Find it here.
4. Free Story Books
My father-in-law once met Dolly Parton while working as a large animal vet, long and strange story, but he always said she was a great person. And I think he was absolutely right. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library will send your child a free book from birth until they are 5 years old – free! Sign up here.
Science lessons can be hard to come by, but there are three great places you can request free science lessons for your kids.
5. Free Science Resource – Science of Coal
This is a wonderful free kit that you can use for children in grade 3-5, or even for middle schoolers. It comes with a teacher’s guide, samples of different stages and kinds of coal for your child to touch and play with, and some suggested activities. I added a documentary or two and we had a study unit on the science and use of coal! The only cost of the coal kit was the couple of dollars I paid for shipping. Get it here.
6. Free Science Resource – Physics Lesson, a comic, and a challenge
The American Physical Society has kits they send out each year to teach middle school aged children a new topic in physics. The kit comes with a teacher’s guide, a comic for the kids to read that is entertaining and informative, and all the materials and instructions to set up an experiment. After your child completes the activity, you submit the results they came up with to be checked by a scientist. All free! Get it here.
7. Free Science Resource – Biology DVDs
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute offers full lectures and talks and documentaries that span a range of biological topics. A lot of these are geared towards high schoolers, but younger children could learn a lot from them as well. You just go to the web site and request the DVDs you want and they send them out to you – free! (there are also activities and more resources available online on their website) We worked through a set of neuroscience lectures that were absolutely fantastic with my (then) middle schoolers! The information is clearly explained in easy to understand ways by researchers who are actually doing the cutting edge research. We learned so much more about the function and design of human brains than I thought I would ever know!
Depending on your worldview, you have to pick and choose carefully, but if you are careful you can get some wonderful resources here! Get it here.
7. Free Full Curriculum with Lesson Plans
Easy Peasy is a free homeschooling resource I used off and on when they kids were younger. It is free, which is great, and also you can take bits and pieces of the lessons plans and adjust them to fit your kids. They also have a sister-site called Allinonehighschool with high school materials for the older kids.
