While homeschool curriculum can be costly, home education doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg. You can homeschool on a tight budget, and the internet provides an abundance of free, or nearly free, resources that you can utilize in your home education program.

Ambleside Online

Ambleside Online is a curriculum guide and booklist designed to follow Charlotte Mason’s method of homeschooling. Each year/grade has a list of books to lay out what resources will need to be collected or purchased, and an optional weekly schedule based on a 36-week school year to break the resources into smaller increments to help with pacing the books throughout the year. There is no fee to use the curriculum or website. Parents may use as much or as little of the booklists and schedules as they like. Some families follow it exactly as laid out, most tweak it a little here and there to use books they already have, or because they prefer another resource over the one listed.” Quoted from the Ambleside website.

An Old Fashioned Education

An Old Fashioned Education, modeled after the popular Charlotte Mason method, utilizes public domain books and texts found online. The course of study is laid out in a four-page chart located on the website. Parents will find that reading the eight page curriculum guide, also located on the website, to be helpful and informative. There is no cost to use the curriculum.

Brightly Beaming

Brightly Beaming is a free online preschool curriculum. Most of the materials are everyday items and can be found in your home, and books can be easily found at your local library.

Calvary Chapel Children’s Ministry Curriculum

This is a free online Bible study curriculum for kids in first through sixth grades. Files are in pdf format, from which you can download and print coloring pages and worksheets for the corresponding study.The Old and New Testament are both available, covering 325 units in all.

Robert Krampf Science Education Company

Free online science videos and experiments. Sign up for his weekly science experiment, delivered right to your email inbox. These experiments use common, everyday household items.

1000 Good Books List

A free online list of books, made up mostly of classic literature, for grades one through twelve. These books can make up a terrific foundation for your reading, literature, history and science curriculum. Nearly all these books can be found in your local library.

Other Ways to Obtain Low-cost Curriculum

The library is a homeschooler’s best friend. Librarians often welcome homeschoolers, and many libraries now host special programs just for homeschoolers. Curriculum swaps through a local homeschool support group, or cooperative, are another terrific way to find used curriculum and materials. If your group doesn’t have one, consider organizing one yourself. Buy used curriculum through a local homeschool support group or conference. You can also find several websites online which buy and sell used curriculum, such as: eBay, HSLDA Curriculum Market, Freecycle, and oodles of others.

Homeschool Resources Galore!

This list is by no means exhaustive. There are many, many more resources available to homeschoolers, and with so much available nowadays, it’s never been easier to home educate- even on a shoestring budget!

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Written by Crystal Killion