My quest to find free homeschool materials online began at Christmas time. Our preschool curriculum was entirely secular in nature, featuring Santa Claus frequently, and we don’t even celebrate Santa Claus at our house. This caught me by surprise (it shouldn’t have) and I had a last minute scramble.
My older children enjoyed the preschool pages and coloring pages I found online so much I soon expanded my search to include materials created for elementary ages. Before long, we were all hooked. I even found a set of free notebooking pages for the digestive sysem! We called it Christmas school. Now every time a holiday nears, my children start asking for special school pages.
Everyone is on a budget these days! You can find many different free homeschool materials online but it definitely helps if you know where to look. Here is how and where I find material to homeschool for free.
The first thing I do when I have a specific need and no money is head over to Pinterest. You may not be used to using Pinterest as a search site but I find it easier and more effective than Google. Within Pinterest, I do very specific searches like “preschool nativity printable free” and see what comes up. A search for Free File Folder Games will turn up more options than you have time to research. I find much of our school material this way, including lapbooks, unit studies, science lessons, math lessons, even blackline maps! Our favorite lessons are the ones that use LEGOs to teach a concept. If you haven’t tried Pinterest yet, free homeschool material is a great reason to go check it out!
If I am looking specifically for a free lapbook or unit study and I can’t find what I want from Pinterest, I will head over to Homeschool Share next. This website has a huge selection of free lapbooks, blank minibooks, unit studies, and more.
If I am looking for study guides for literature or reading lists for a Charlotte Mason style curriculum, I start at Ambleside Online. The whole idea of Ambleside Online is to provide a free curriculum guide for each grade using all free public domain books. The depth to this site is amazing!
All-In-One Curriculum is another option for a complete and free curriculum through grade 8. The author also includes links to individual courses for each year and this is very handy! You can choose to use her math curriculum and not use or print the full material this way.
One of my all-time favorite resources is NotebookingPages.com. I tend to forget to include this in a list for free materials since I paid for the fabulous lifetime membership, but Debra does include so many free pages on this site including her entire Bible curriculum and her character development curriculum. You do have to actually become a free member to download the material, but this is a quick, easy, and painless process.
Having trouble explaining Algebra or Trigonometry or Chemistry? I was amazed at the number of free teaching videos (3000!) at Khan Academy. Since math is not my strong point, we will be using this site over and over for many years. As the site says, you can learn almost anything for free.
Once you have downloaded and printed your free material, it can be tricky to actually schedule your material in an organized way, especially if you are using a bunch of different resources from all over the web. Besides having some great printables for your student, DonnaYoung.org also offers a great set of free planning forms for Mom!
Now for the best part: You do not have to use any of the free material you find exactly as it is written. Change it up to meet your needs! Take that booklet the creator expected you to color and staple and instead use it as a sequencing activity. Take the free file folder game you found and create notebooking pages instead. Use the pictures from the preschool printables as story starters for your elementary writer.
Use your imagination and think outside the box to get what you need from what you have. Once you get your creative juices going, you will be amazed at how much schooling you can do for free!
Easy peasy all in one has high school stuff now. 🙂 This is a great article. Thanks for the tips. Totally agree with you on Pinterest. It has its uses!