Homeschooling - free online resources

Homeschooling is not always a choice that is good for your budget! It is very easy to get carried away with purchasing curriculum, manipulatives, supplies, and every little neat thing you come across. So in an effort to help you keep costs down, I am going to write a series of posts devoted to low cost homeschooling. This post is about my favorite websites and is full of links to free online resources.

  

Some of my favorite websites for the kids:

Starfall is for the preschool and kindergarten set. It teaches letters, phonics, and reading. It combines videos, games, and interactive stories to teach children how to read.

ABCya is for elementary students from Kindergarten through fifth grade and is separated by grade level. It has educational games for math, English, typing skills, and geography, as well as purely fun and holiday themed games.

Sheppard software has learning games for preschool through high school. The subject matter includes everything from colors and animals to math, science, geography, history, and language arts.

Book Adventure is a book reading program.  Your child reads a book then takes a quiz on it (you can check if a book has a corresponding quiz first).  If they do well they earn points toward prizes they can redeem.

GA Virtual Learning is for middle school and high school students. It is a free resource from Georgia public schools. They have complete courses in every subject you can imagine. The courses include videos, power point presentations, games, quizzes, writing assignments, and more. The parent would be responsible for all grading – this is a resource not an online school.

Some of my favorite websites for the parents:

Homeschool Skedtrack is a program to keep track of attendance, assignments, and grades. For older children, you can give them a login so they can keep up with their own assignments. This has been a life-saver for me! I am very type-A, so this helps me, but if you are not type-A it may stress you out.

Evernote is not a homeschool site but it can revolutionize the way you keep track of online resources, pdfs, and anything else on your computer or the web that you want to remember and organize.

Free Homeschool Deals is a great way to snag free ebooks, curriculum, and more. I always go ahead and download anything that looks promising while it's free, even if I'm not sure I will use it. A few extra pdfs on my computer (or in my Evernote) are not taking up valuable shelf space, but may come in handy later.

Easy Peasy All-in-one Homeschool is a blog of one family's curriculum. I have never used her actual plan for each day but she has done a lot of research to list online resources. She has it organized by grade level and subject – be sure to take a look at the music and art classes.

ABC Teach has free worksheets for preschool through high school for every subject. Not all of the worksheets are free but many are and it is easy to sort by which ones are free.  You do not have be a member to print the free worksheets.  Some of my favorites are the book report forms.

Homeschool Share is great for lapbooks and unit studies. I also like Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Do NOT buy curriculum for kindergarten. There are so many free worksheets out there. Try Kids LearningStation, edHelper, or kindergarten worksheets.

For learning fun tailored to what you are studying, try a word search generator from edHelper, armored penguin, or ABCya (which also has a junior version for simpler ones).

Math worksheets are great for drills and review. There are too many out there to list but try these: homeschool math, math drills, or math-u-see.

I could fill many more pages of the amazing resources that are available out there for free (and maybe one day I will).  Hopefully, this gets you started on homeschooling on a budget.