So, you’ve decided to homeschool. Unfortunately, you don’t have a budget of hundreds of dollars to drop on each course, especially when you’re just getting started and don’t yet know what is going to work well for you and your family.
However, most curricula don’t come with a money-back guarantee if it doesn’t click for your child, so experimenting with different options can get expensive fast.
Fortunately, there are a few options out there that are not only affordable but completely free, giving you a little more freedom to try out different approaches.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a miracle for homeschooling. Their whole idea is that learning should be accessible to anyone, and I’ve watched their site and options expand massively since I first used some of their videos to help my older kids with math over a decade ago.
Your kids won’t get overwhelmed or distracted by excessive cartoon characters and elaborate interfaces here. The site is up-to-date with everything you need for a course and not extraneous.
For instance, when you sign in for the Algebra 2 course, you’ll see it divided into 12 units, each with around 10-12 exercises, plus video lessons, quizzes, and a final exam. Your student can go back and repeat any exercise as many times as needed and can always refer back to the video lessons.
The best part is that Khan Academy is no longer just the best place for math help — it also offers complete courses in science, art, language arts, and more.
One downside: because it’s free, the language arts options all use the material in the public domain, so if you want a broader base of reading material, you’ll have to supplement it.
Core Knowledge
Core Knowledge offers a complete curriculum for almost any course you could need through middle school, most of which is free. An exception is some of the literature books not in the public domain — some of which you may be able to source through a local library instead.
You can download textbooks, workbooks, and teacher manuals for full courses for free. Courses are typically broken up into six or more units, meaning the file sizes aren’t quite as demanding on your devices. For instance, Grade 5 History & Geography is broken into 14 units, including The Civil War, U.S. Geography, Understanding Economics, and others.
Textbooks are available for math, science, history, and language arts. Not all courses have separate workbooks and teacher guides, but when they do, they are also available for free download.
It’s an excellent option if you want work you can download for your child to do offline instead of an online program.
Discovery K12
As the name suggests, Discovery K12’s program is complete from kindergarten through 12th grade. Each day, your student gets assignments in each subject, including Reading, Language Arts, Math, Science, and History/Social Studies, and Physical Education and Arts.
It works by giving your child an outline of the day’s focus, linking to various sources, including YouTube videos, NASA documentation, sites like HowStuffWorks, online encyclopedias (Wikipedia and Brittanica), and more.
The downside is that it’s a bit bare-bones and can be relatively dry. Since it’s all free, the literature is all material in the public domain, so if you want to expose your child to newer material, you’ll have to add that yourself. It also doesn’t have a lot of options for customizing, so, for instance, you can’t have your child in 6th-grade language arts and 7th-grade math.
You can, however, choose to use some parts and not others. For instance, you can use Discovery K12 to meet the requirements for your child’s science and history so that you can devote more of your homeschool budget to the math curriculum you want and some excellent books.
The daily tasks are all online, but some assignments require your child to grab a pencil and paper.
Another perk: DK12 will print your homeschool ID cards, which can be handy for field trips and discounts targeted at homeschoolers.
CK-12
CK-12 offers free digital textbooks, FlexBooks (which teachers can customize), study guides, and more to build a curriculum at no cost. They’ve even added an AI tutor now!
They offer teacher editions of most textbooks to match the student book and additional programs for educators. They also have materials to help students prepare for a high school equivalency exam or GED, materials for learning English as a Second Language (ESL), and a few college texts for your most advanced students.
In addition to downloadable textbooks for each course, the site has interactive math lessons.
Monterey Bay Aquarium (Mini Courses)
If your child is interested in learning more about marine biology and ecology, the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California is happy to help.
They have a variety of free courses — 11 at the moment — divided up by grade level. If you sign your child up, they’ll send each lesson by email. For instance, their course, “Fin-tastic Sharks” for grades 3-5, is broken down into 48 lessons including video and hands-on activities.
While these free mini-courses won’t take an entire school year to complete, they’re great to add to some of the dryer text-centric curriculum, especially if you combine several throughout the year!
At Home Middle School
At Home Middle School’s lessons utilize some of the same free curriculum resources already mentioned. For instance, their 6th grade Life Science unit uses the CK12 Life Science textbook.
However, they add a few things, such as laying out the specific assignments daily and bringing together the subjects. They also add some cool extras, including coding and chess, and a daily writing assignment.
Though the curriculum is offered for free, some assignments involve reading novels that are not in the public domain, which means that if you use this curriculum entirely, you’ll have to either buy or borrow those books. Your library likely has most of them, and you can always skip or substitute any you can’t obtain.
Zearn
Zearn is such a cool site to utilize as math curriculum, because you can log in as a parent and set up the assignments you want each kid to do, and then check back in.
Yet the work is predominantly game-based, so even when your child is learning to count by threes or multiply fractions, they’re having fun and building genuine connections between the numbers and their functions.
Zearn will take your child from counting to the Pythagorean Theorem, and the only downside is that it doesn’t continue into high school math.