Homeschooling can be a rewarding experience and a good choice for many families, especially in cases where the public school system isn’t a good fit.
Unfortunately, a fully prepared curriculum can be expensive. Some families spend hundreds of dollars per year for each kid, and that’s not counting educational trips and other supplies. Searching for affordable (or free) curriculum options can be overwhelming.
The good news is that there are some great resources out there, and many of them are free. Here are some of the best free Homeschool resources I’ve found over the years.
Core Knowledge
I just stumbled over this website earlier this year, and I wish I’d found it when I had multiple kids homeschooling.
It has a ton of completely free textbooks to download as PDF files, and each year and subject is broken up into multiple smaller files or units. For example, 6th grade science has six units, including Light and Matter, Weather, Climate, and Water Cycling, and Cells and Systems. For each unit, I can download a PDF of the textbook for free and separately download a teacher guide and student work pages.
If you prefer physical books, the site sells paper copies of its curriculum. The site also has some literature curricula based on copyrighted material, so not everything is free. Still, tons of textbooks are, and there are free work pages and teacher guides even for the subjects requiring you to buy a book.
Ultimately, you can have a free science, social studies, and math curriculum here. For literature, there are many items available for free, including teacher materials and some classics that are out of copyright.
Zearn
Parents in my homeschool groups rave about Zearn.
It costs for schools or classes larger than 35 students, but it’s free for homeschooling or teaching 35 students or fewer.
You can use it as a full curriculum, but we’ve employed it in the past as a supplement when kids have struggled with a specific concept or need extra practice in a certain area of math. In fact, that’s one of the most common uses I see—it’s often recommended when parents vent that another curriculum doesn’t seem to be working for their child.
It’s a nice combination of video lessons followed by interactive practice. Parents can set up their own accounts to choose what lessons their kids should be assigned. They can sign in to check on their progress and results or track their progress via email.
NASA
The NASA website has so many amazing videos, lessons, and interactive materials to use for your kids.
It’s not a full curriculum, but you can incorporate much of the material for your science classes. You can see one example above, in a game called Go To The Head Of The Solar System. All of it is free.
It’s also really easy to sort and find the right items to meet your needs — just make selections in the menu on the left to narrow down the grade level and what type of resource you’re seeking. For instance, you could choose “Grades 5-8,” “Human Space Exploration,” and “Videos” to find a list of excellent educational clips, including a video about the 1969 Apollo 11 launch and one about how the Space Launch System sends rockets into the sky.
Available subjects include Computer Science, Earth Science, Life Science, Space Science, History, Mathematics, and even Art.
Coursera
If you’re a lifelong learner, you may already be familiar with Coursera.
The site has many college courses and career certifications that are not free, but it also has a hefty selection of free courses, and some of them are suitable for high school students. At the time of this writing, free courses include a health class called Vital Signs: What The Body Is Telling Us from the University of Pennsylvania; A Johns Hopkins University course titled HTML, CSS, & Javascript for Web Developers; and Game Theory from Stanford University, along with hundreds of others.
Parents will need to look over any specific courses in advance to be sure they’re appropriate for their children, but as long as they have the time to invest in vetting the right courses for their children, this is an amazing resource that gives access to university-level education for free.
ReadTheory
ReadTheory is not a full ELA curriculum, but it’s an excellent resource for practicing reading comprehension.
Once you sign up, your child will take quizzes that match the questions they’ll have on standardized tests. The first step is an assessment that determines which quizzes your child will go forward with; then they’ll continue to access practice tests on an appropriate level.
This is great practice for excelling on the end-of-grade tests or just to ensure your child’s reading comprehension skills are up to par.
There is also a paid version of the site, but you can access the quizzes for free, making this a great resource to add to your homeschool.
CK-12
On CK-12, you’ll find completely free curriculum items, including textbooks.
The website has many free textbooks, from elementary science and math to adult education programs. You can even introduce your child to a few college programs, including College Algebra and College Human Biology.
You can access them on the website, chapter by chapter, but you can also download ebook versions for free through Amazon for Kindle if you’d like to use them offline.
We’ve used a few middle school science texts in our household, specifically CK-12 Life Science for Middle School and CK-12 Earth Science for Middle School.
In addition to free textbooks, the site also offers some interactive materials.
ReadWorks
ReadWorks is a nonprofit program. You will get a pop-up invitation to donate when you make your account, but it’s entirely optional.
Here, you’ll find free texts for your child to read that are fun and entertaining but also educational. They offer topics that are current and relevant — for example, as I peruse the site right now, in mid-November, I’m invited to check out their content regarding the history of Thanksgiving, a passage for 8th graders about why U.S. elections are held on a Tuesday in November; Veterans Day passages; and information about Native Americans, among others.
The site also offers material for English Language Learners, paired articles (two separate articles on the same topic to encourage kids to think critically about what they read), and plenty of fiction to accompany the supply of nonfiction passages.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy might be my favorite free educational resource.
First of all, you can use it without an account. So, let’s say you already have a math curriculum, but your child is struggling with multiplication or adding fractions. You can click the Khan Academy website and find a video lesson reiterating how the process works, followed by practice problems, even if you don’t want to stop and set up an account.
The video lessons are excellent, with clear, simple explanations and examples. They’re so accessible that when my daughter was in middle school, she would pop on and watch some of the college-level science videos for fun and then come tell me everything she’d learned.
On the other hand, if you want to set up an account, you can assign your child lessons in math, science, computer programming, language arts, social studies, financial literacy, and internet safety.
There are even “get ready” courses to ensure your child is prepared for the next grade or subject. In the same vein, there are courses for SAT prep, LSAT prep, and MCAT prep.
PBS LearningMedia
PBS is well-known for its educational content.
I highly recommend the PBS Kids app for your younger kids to do activities and watch educational programs. Then, head over to the website to pick curriculum extras for your school-aged kids.
For instance, above you can get a glimpse of the site’s lesson on The Sun, Earth, & Moon. Clicking through to this lesson offers a minute-long video explaining the movement of the Earth and moon, the difference between rotation and revolution, and how these create days and nights, seasons, and eclipses. Then, there are a few questions to answer below.
If you want to teach a science, social studies, or math topic, it’s probably available here as a video. You can cover the civil rights movement, the U.S. Constitution, simplifying fractions, finding the volume of a cylinder, the water cycle, moon phases, and so many other topics.
It’s all free, and you can explore as much as you like without even making an account. You can also make an account and log in to track your child’s progress.
American Chemical Society
Ready to introduce your kids to the joys of chemistry? The American Chemical Society offers activities that even your youngest learners will love.
It’s completely free, and you can start with basic science experiments like (seen above) adding food coloring to a dish of milk to watch how they spread. You can then move through other fun kiddie experiments before progressing to middle school lessons, like how heat transfers and high school projects, including Chemistry Olympiad and the ChemMatters magazine.
The site even offers material for undergraduate and graduate students, so your child can take the lessons and information provided here as far as they like.
It’s not a complete curriculum, but the experiments and articles available through the American Chemical Society are great supplements to add if your primary curriculum is all text, and they’re free.
Fishtank
Fishtank offers free math and ELA curriculum, but the ELA curriculum centers around book lists, so you’ll still have to buy the books or borrow them from your local library.
However, many of the books should be fairly accessible. For example, the tenth-grade book list includes Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, Antigone by Sophocles, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita In Tehran, among others. Antigone is available in free PDFs from various sources, and most libraries will have copies of Bradbury.
A ton of other resources are also incorporated that are accessible for free, including speech transcripts, podcasts, videos, and analytical articles, so it would be possible to use the curriculum and skip items you can’t obtain.
As of this writing, you can upgrade to Fishtank Plus for extra features for $95 per year, but there’s a lot of material for free.
OpenStax
If you need another source for free downloadable textbooks, OpenStax has a variety.
They offer free textbooks for K-12 and college in subjects from Math and American Government to Health Science, Sociology, and Psychology. Once you select a textbook that suits your needs, you can choose between three options for accessing it (two free). You can view the book online within the website, download a PDF for offline use, or order a paper copy. You’ll only pay if you decide you want a physical copy (and even then, you can find used copies of many of the texts on Amazon for lower than the list price).
OpenStax is provided through Rice University and supported by philanthropy, so there is a banner ad on the site requesting donations, and there may be a pop-up requesting donations when you select your book, but any donation is entirely optional and the whole point of the site is to make the material accessible to anyone and everyone for free.
Since the site also includes college material, including philosophy, nursing, computer science, and more, you might even find something for yourself and your child.
School Yourself
I’ll admit this site’s navigation isn’t the most exciting, but the learning material on SchoolYourself is excellent.
For instance, we all sat through school lessons on the Pythagorean Theorem and learned that we can find the length of one side of a right triangle if we know the length of the other two sides and how to find squares and square roots. If your math class was like mine, you were given this equation to memorize and some problems to practice, but you were never told why this worked.
SchoolYourself‘s Pythagorean Theorem video, though, explains why this works by showing the same right triangle copied multiple times to make a square and walking the student through relating the area of said square to the length of the triangle’s hypotenuse.
The available subjects include Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2, Trigonometry, Calculus, and Statistics. You can either create an account to track progress or use the materials without logging in.
EdX
EdX is another absolutely brilliant resource for complete online courses. Here, you can access a virtually unlimited selection of college classes. While many are offered for a fee, there are also thousands of free courses available.
Some examples currently include CS50’s Introduction To Computer Science via Harvard University, Introduction To Biology: The Secret Of Life via Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Introduction to Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology through the University of Cambridge. Others currently available for free allow students to learn about ancient Egyptian art and archeology, dig into medical terminology, introduce themselves to the science of animal behavior, or start learning a new language.
These are actual courses to be taken with a class, so expect start dates for enrollment and assignments on a schedule. However, some courses may be available as archived versions, where your student can access the information at their own pace. Some free courses offer an optional paid upgrade that may include certification.
Discovery K12
Discovery K12 is another option that provides all the basics for a free curriculum, although adding a parent account to track everything for you does cost. That’s currently $99 per year, but if you’re willing to track your child’s work yourself, it’s not necessary.
The program includes free e-books, which means that you won’t have to purchase or borrow books for the literature courses, unlike some of the other curricula we’ve looked at. However, bear in mind that the free library consists of material that’s out of copyright. If your child will enjoy learning from classics like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jack London’s White Fang, and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows, it’s a great choice. Still, if you’re hoping to include more contemporary works, you’ll need to supplement or mix the curriculum up a little.
The curriculum includes video lessons, online text, and tests. At the end of each day, your child can click a link to email you about what they learned that day.
Visually, it’s pretty basic and bare-bones, but it does have grade-level material for every subject, so it’s a good place to start if you need a complete and free curriculum on short notice.
