How to Homeschool for FREE! My Zero Cost Homeschool Plan.
Are you thinking about homeschooling your child, but unsure how much it costs or where to get the best deal? Well, you’re in the right place, because I have some great options that you can employ for free!
For grades 1-5, save time as well as money by using the free-to-download PDFs of the excellent curriculum from “The Good and the Beautiful”. After 5th grade, or as an alternative, use “Freedom Homeschooling” to browse any and all of the free curricula the internet has to offer.
Let’s take a deep dive into why The Good and the Beautiful (aka TGTB) is so great, and then, to give you some more options, we’ll explore Freedom Homeschooling and some of its suggested curricula.
The Good and the Beautiful
For students in grades 1-5, The Good and the Beautiful is an excellent free homeschooling resource.
Missions
The mission of TGTB is three-fold. The first part is to teach children advanced academics while at the same time showing them everything good and beautiful in both life and learning. They want to instill a love of learning and of wholesome literature.
The second is to make homeschooling easier for you! You don’t need to be overwhelmed or spend too much time on this curriculum because you can just open up to the next lesson and go, without any reading ahead or prep time.
The third is to offer you the highest quality resources at an affordable price. The math and literature units are free to download for grades 1-5, and the history and science units are priced with families in mind.
How it Started
In 2015, Jenny Phillips wanted to created the homeschool curriculum that she dreamed of, because she couldn’t find it anywhere else.
- She wanted it to use literature that was powerful and completely clean.
- She wanted it to combine subjects to make shorter school times more meaningful.
- She wanted it open-and-go, while being academically strong and thorough.
- She dreamed of a curriculum that emphasized God, nature, and high character (see General Christian Worldview).
- And finally, she wanted it to be engaging, meaningful, and visually beautiful.
So, she used her degree in English, teaching experience, and other skills to create the Language arts curriculum. She shared it, and it was a hit! So she started a company, expanded the curriculum, and here we are!
How it Works
To use this as a free resource, all you need to do is download the content. Print it out according to how you want it, and then just open it up to the page you need! There’s no prep time required: just open and go. Some subjects are combined as well, cutting down on time spent on it even more.
It’s worth noting here that only grades 1-5 are free. After that, you’ll either have to start paying for the next batch of curriculum (it’s still affordable!) or find another resource. Some of the subjects within those grades aren’t free either, so you might end up mixing this curriculum with others, which you can easily find on Freedom Homeschooling.
Language Arts
To start off with language arts, they have a placement test for your child to take to see where they should start.
Grammar and phonics are taught in a way that combines them with other topics to make them interesting, meaningful, and connected. The phonics program is especially effective and parents love it.
Instead of teaching spelling through long spelling lists where the meaning of the word is less important, spelling is taught through high-quality literature, combining writing the word with phonics, and short lists of carefully selected words that break rules or are commonly misspelled. They’ve also made a list of spelling rules that are actually useful (not like i before e…)
They teach writing the same way all authors learn to write: by reading! Read, read, read, that’ll teach you how to write. They have compiled a large amount of high-quality literature that’s completely clean. These courses teach children to read well and think deeply, which in turn lets them read even more. (Source)
Handwriting
When kids are still new to writing, assignments that require a lot of writing can be more of a burden than a benefit. The handwriting courses here can help them gain confidence in their ability to write both comfortably and legibly. This makes writing a medium for expression rather than a weight that drags down other work.
On the other hand, the handwriting curriculum has to be paid for, so instead of using this one, use those reasons and Freedom Homeschooling to find a free curriculum for handwriting.
Math
The math curriculum comes in free-to-download PDFs for grades 1-5. The lessons are open-and-go (meaning zero prep time required), and they incorporate games, hands-on learning, and fun activities into the teaching method, making daily lessons exciting and engaging rather than boring or tedious.
The intention of the courses is to help your student develop foundational skills for math, including a strong number sense (flexible thinking and intuition about numbers) and mathematical thinking.
History
This section of the curriculum is also paid for, so if you’re looking for completely free history courses, Freedom Homeschooling recommends American Heritage Education Foundation for K-12 or Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool for 1-8 and 9-12.
You can also access TGTB’s unit outline for free, where they explain how their history courses are organized and show how each of their units progress through the periods of history. If you like the ideas you find there, you might try adapting the curriculum you do end up choosing to match your philosophy.
Science and Health
The science course comes in multiple units, with the most expensive being around $30, and the least expensive being only $5 (with the exception of the Marine Biology unit, which is free). Like the math lessons, they’re completely open-and-go, so you don’t have to read ahead. You can also teach the units in pretty much any order you (or your kids) choose.
This part of the curriculum seems pretty expensive since there’s so many purchases to make, so keeping your budget at $0 would have to mean looking elsewhere. In order to keep the curriculum consistent, Freedom Homeschooling recommends CK-12 for K-12 or Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool for 1-8 and 9-12.
Reviews
Homeschool.com, a site dedicated to helping homeschool families gave TGTB a very positive review, praising both the phonics reading program and the thoroughness of all of the subjects.
Among all the pros (including the open-and-go, family teaching style, the way it gets kids reading, and the way it promotes students to pursue their own learning), the only con they could find was that it’s completely text-based (though they didn’t find it a con themselves, and the science and history courses incorporate more than text).
A parent who teaches their teens with TGTB remarks to Homeschool.com that the teens love it, so don’t even have to bug their teens to do their schoolwork! (Source)
General Christian Worldview
The curriculum states plainly that it holds a general Christian worldview, meaning that they focus on High moral character and basic Bible principles, including gratitude and honesty. It does not include any doctrine specific to any Christian church.
The founder, Jenny Phillips, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and created the curriculum for her children. The curriculum has since been reviewed by members of many other faiths in order to make sure there are no doctrines specific to any one faith.
Users and reviewers of the curriculum include members of the following denominations: Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Methodist, Non-Denominational, and more.
Freedom Homeschooling
If your child is above the 5th grade and TGTB is no longer free for them, or it for some reason didn’t for you, stop at Freedom Homeschooling to find some other options.
What it is
Freedom Homeschooling is a website created to point you to free homeschooling resources and curriculums, eliminating the need for you to go through the whole Pinterest list or web search to find something that will work for you. Essentially, it’s an index of all the curriculum options you have from kindergarten all the way up to the twelfth grade.
You just click on the subject you’re looking for and it takes you to an alphabetical list of all of the free resources on the web, along with a short description of each.
You can use this tool to put together the best curriculums for each subject from across the web and make the curriculum that works best for you and your child, or you can even use their list of all-in-one curriculums for less hassle. Either way, they’re all in one place here, complete with links so that you can easily check out each curriculum and compare them to the rest.
Here are some of the options you’ll find listed on Freedom Homeschooling:
Discovery K-12
Discovery K-12 (not to be confused with K-12, a government-funded public school at home program) is an online homeschool platform and curriculum designed for pre-K through 12th grade.
It has the 7 standard courses: Language Arts, Reading and Literature, Math, Science, Social Studies, Visual and Performing Arts, and Physical Education.
You can access the curriculum by grade and download it as a PDF. Each grade’s page has an outline of the contents of the curriculum, which you can use to look ahead and see what you’ll be doing.
Currently, the curriculum they’re offering is called the 2021-2022 Curriculum, which suggests that they may update it yearly.
Your student can get a free account on the website to access the online resources, including quizzes, eBooks, STEM activities, and extra curriculum. Adding a parent account does cost money, though.
Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool
Easy Peast All-in-One Homeschool is a completely free homeschool curriculum for all ages. It’s got all the core subjects and more, and there is even a sister site for when your student would be entering high school.
You might have noticed that this one popped up as the alternative whenever TGTB required payment to get the material. That’s because this curriculum is free from the ground up, and as I’ve had some pedagogical training myself, I know that it’s a lot less complicated to stay on track when the method itself knows what your student has already learned.
You don’t enroll or pay anything, because all you have to do is download or print the worksheets. All your need is access to a computer and maybe a few minor supplies.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a great resource for homeschooling (or even supplementing classroom school), especially for high school students. It’s mostly known for and focused on math, but it also teaches a variety of other subjects: science, economics, engineering, computing, arts, history, and humanities. It even has English language arts. (Source)
Khan Academy is a non-profit organization, meaning it’s completely free as a homeschooling resource, allowing you to homeschool even your high schooler at no cost. They do offer SAT prep for a fee (which shouldn’t be surprising, as the SAT itself has a registration fee), but everything else is free.
They even have an app for teaching kids aged 2-7 called Khan Academy Kids.
It’s an online tool that teaches through videos and interactive tools as well as readings, and it helps students who have a hard time in a certain subject to improve and become more proficient in it. That might be why it’s so well known for its math resources.
On top of its being completely free, it also offers AP courses for high school students. That means your high schooler can get college credits for free!
A course has to be approved by the College Board in order to be called AP, making Khan Academy one of the few ways (if not the only way) to get college credit from homeschool. With Khan Academy, they can take the course, pass the test, and BOOM! College credit. (Source)