Free Homeschool Curriculum
You are in the right place if you’re looking for FREE homeschool curriculum!
(please note that this post includes affiliate links. Read my disclosure here.)
We began homeschooling by accident — kind of a serendipitous and miraculous accident if you ask me. You can read all about it here: Why I decided to homeschool.
Because it caught me by surprise, and because I never intended to continue, I really didn’t want to spend thousands on expensive curriculum. My mother-in-law, who had taught kindergarten for many years and had recently retired, gave me a workbook of phonics worksheets I could photocopy and an alphabet poster to hang on my wall.
She also gave me some suggestions for phonics games and number games, using just items I had around the house. It worked out great!
After that first year, we decided to jump into homeschooling with both feet! I pored over the Rainbow Resource catalog and made a gigantic list of everything I would need to homeschool my now 1st grader and kindergartener: Latin, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Neuroscience, Oil Painting, Olympic Figure Skating and Aerospace Engineering. Plus math and language arts for geniuses. (Totally kidding, ha, ha!) Shockingly, it totalled around $5k, ha, ha. Well, that wasn’t gonna work!
I trimmed my expectations, ha, ha, but I also found a whole bunch of awesome free resources that allowed me to focus our budget on the items I couldn’t live without, along with music lessons. The free resources have literally saved me tens of thousands of dollars over the fifteen years we’ve been homeschooling.
Because I figured I’m probably not the only homeschool mom who didn’t want to spend thousands on curriculum, I’ve compiled this gigantic list of FREE curricula by subject.
If you happen to find a link that isn’t valid any longer, please leave me a comment and let me know. Please also feel free to let me know about resources I have missed! It is hard to keep up lists, since links inevitably change, but I will try!
Without further ado, here is my gigantic list of freebies for homeschoolers, organized by subject:
Free Homeschool Curriculum
Free Homeschool Curriculum for Preschool and Kindergarten
Are you planning to homeschool a kindergartener? Or a preschooler? Because those ages are a whole different ballgame.
Seriously, I think kindergarten is probably my very favorite age to homeschool! They are the perfect age — old enough to be excited about learning, yet young enough to be excited about everything.
I dedicated an entire post to free homeschool curriculum for kindergarten (and it applies to preschoolers, too!).
Homeschool Your Kindergartener (for free!) in Under 20 Minutes a Day
A Complete Homeschool Kindergarten Math Curriculum. An entire kindergarten math curriculum, free.
Teaching Shapes and Colors Free Curriculum for preschool kiddos.
8 Free Sight Words Coloring Pages by Blessed Homeschool
Free Homeschool Curriculum for Math
The Math Arcade at We Play Math has FREE, fun games for practicing those pesky math facts that it’s so important to have on instant, automatic recall.
If you have a little one trying to memorize the addition and subtraction facts, you’ll love this fun, FREE bundle of games, also from We Play Math. The 61-page bundle of printables includes FAXX, a fast-paced, strategic card game for the whole family, coloring pages, puzzles, some fact family card games, ‘Clip it! Flip it!’, and ‘More or Less Fun’.
A Complete Homeschool Kindergarten Math Curriculum. An entire kindergarten math curriculum, free.
Kindergarten math is a little different, so if you’re homeschooling a kindergartener, check out this post: Homeschool your kindergartener in just 20 minutes a day (with free resources and free printable games!)
FREE DIY Math Manipulative Kit
Free Printable Ten Frame and Math Games
Free Printable Place Value Chart and Games
Orison Orchards Math Games. Math is my favorite subject and I love to gamify math drill and concepts for my own kiddos. I’ve shared many of them here on my blog for you to use in your own homeschool.
Don Potter has scanned First-Lessons in Arithmetic, Jones Bros., 1878, an old math textbook he used growing up. He provides free downloads on his site. In his own words, he finds this textbook “vastly superior to the confusing modern consumable workbook that plagues today’s classrooms.”
Starfall This interactive site covers phonics, reading, and math skills for kindergarten through 3rd grade. The free version has tons of fun content, but you do need a subscription to unlock some of the videos and games.
The Measured Mom has tons of games and free printable homeschool curriculum, mainly for K-3, to teach your kids in a fun, multi-sensory way. She also has lots of suggestions and advice for how to teach math so your kids won’t object.
Star Wars Math Challenge this is just a seven-day math challenge and not a full curriculum, but if you need a way to inspire a star-wars-loving child in about first grade, this is a great way to do it!
Khan Academy This is one of our favorite sites for math, but they also offer science, coding, computer science, and test prep! I love that I was able to sign up for a parent site where I can keep up with all of my children’s work. Sal Khan’s math videos are genius! He is so great at explaining to kids on their level.
Wolfram Alpha Mainly upper level math and science, these free homeschool lesson plans have been uploaded by educators using the Wolfram Alpha curricula.
MathaTube Free homeschool worksheets and free printable homeschool curriculum for many different levels.
Math-Aids Free homeschool worksheets for most levels of math.
XtraMath This site is chock full of free drills for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. It keeps track of missed facts and repeats those until mastered.
Free Language Arts (reading, vocabulary, spelling and writing) Curriculum
How to Homeschool Your Kindergartener in 20 minutes Per Day (for free!) breaks phonics down so it can be taught easily. It contains a list of phonics rules, with free printables and games for teaching each rule.
Don Potter has provided links to a free, printable phonics curriculum called Blend Phonics. It includes phonetic readers that are 100 percent decodable, without sight words or pictures (to avoid giving visual or contextual clues). He also provides a complete cursive handwriting curriculum for beginning readers because he advocates, like Romalda Spalding in her book, ‘The Writing Road to Reading’, teaching children to read through writing. He especially advocated using cursive, and also provides a free cursive program. I used strategies from The Writing Road to Reading to correct letter reversal and mirror writing in seven of my eight children, and highly recommend it. Don’s program looks very helpful, too!
The Good and the Beautiful Language Arts Curriculum a non-denominational, Christian curriculum focusing on bringing beauty and joy back into homeschool. The Good and the Beautiful Language Arts curriculum has free PDF course downloads for levels 1 – 5. The downloads, which can be viewed on any electronic device, is identical to the printed versions that they sell.
Starfall This interactive site covers phonics, reading, and math skills for kindergarten through 3rd grade. The free version has tons of fun content, but you do need a subscription to unlock some of the videos and games.
The Measured Mom site is full of amazing free games and free printable homeschool curriculum to teach kids phonics. Her ideas are geared to grades K-3.
This Reading Mama has terrific, free homeschool worksheets, games and resources, too. She also had lots of ideas for how to remediate poor reading skills in older kids.
Listen, Write and Read Early Literacy Stages – A progressive curriculum to improve reading and writing with a focus on sight words.
Starfall.com This online reading program also offers a fun app so you can take learning on the road.
EnglishGrammar101.com Free online grammar lessons that are graded for you. Bonus!
Scott Foresman Reading Grammar and writing — free homeschool curriculum online
Treasures workbooks Spelling and Grammar — free homeschool worksheets
KISS Grammar workbooks Free homeschool worksheets for grammar all the way through high school
Daily Grammar gives you free homeschool lesson plans by topic
Ambleside Online has wonderful, classic book lists (and much, much more)
All In One Homeschool (aka Easy Peasy) It covers reading, writing, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, math, history/social studies/geography, science, Spanish, Bible, computer, music, art, PE/health, and logic, using only free materials found on the internet.
Free Poetry Lesson Plans from Poets.org
History and Geography Free Homeschool Lesson Plans and Resources
Civil War Curriculum These lessons plans would be so much fun combined with actual field trips to the battlefields!
Free Virtual Tour of The Alamo
Free homeschool lesson plans from the Bill of Rights Institute
Free homeschool lesson plans about Colonial Williamsburg
Seterra Geography The interactive map games, free printables and geography quizzes are a fantastic learning tool for homeschoolers.
Free Homeschool Curriculum for Science
Life Science Curriculum – This Life Science curriculum is free, but each one after the Life Science is priced around $50.00. It is secular.
Astronomy Curriculum Digitalis Education Solutions provides these lessons free of charge as a public service to encourage the teaching of astronomy. It consists of astronomy lesson plans for use for kindergarten through twelfth grade students.
Engineering Lesson Plans and Curriculum TryEngineering offers a variety of free homeschool lesson plans that help parents and students to learn and apply engineering principles in the home.
The Water Cycle Free homeschool lesson plans
Biology Lesson Plans Free homeschool lesson plans, worksheets and activities
Anatomy & Physiology Unit Studies Free homeschool worksheets
Polar Bear Unit & Lesson Free homeschool lesson plans
Nutrition Lesson Plans and games More freebies for homeschoolers
Gardening Lessons Plans and games
Cross-curricular Freebies for Homeschoolers
K5 Learning Free worksheets for grades K-5 in multiple subjects, including math, language arts and cursive. Some of the sections require a membership to use, but lots of the site is free.
Free Homeschool Deals This fun site is full of fun, free homeschool worksheets for every holiday, word activities, and lots of unit studies. Everything is free to print and use for your own family.
Unit studies from Scholastic These free homeschool lessons plans and Unit Studies are organized by grade and subject. They are intended to be taught in a classroom by a teacher, but can be adapted to suit your needs.
An Old Fashioned Curriculum Curriculum using mainly free public domain textbooks, literature and curriculum. You can choose to use grade-level plans or choose individual subjects on the website. My favorite resource on this site is the McGuffey Readers.
Financial Literacy Free Homeschool Curriculum
Practical Money Skills These financial literacy materials, including classroom modules, games, DVDs and brochures, are free and available for download.
Hands on Banking The Hands on Banking® courses include free instructor guides with classroom lessons and activities that will help you guide students through real-life scenarios and group discussions to teach valuable financial skills.
Money Instructor For over a decade, Money Instructor® has been helping millions of people teach and learn money skills, personal finance, money management, business, careers, real life skills, and more.
Free Foreign Language Curriculum
Duolingo This fun site will teach your kids Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Swedish, Portuguese, Irish, or another language, mainly through games. It’s hard to believe that it is all free!
Free language lessons from Open Culture Download audio lessons to your computer or mp3 player and you’re good to go.
Memrise Memrise is another free language learning app. It’s not as smooth as Duolingo, but it is easy to work with, supports offline courses, and lets you learn a massive number of languages. They also offer other subjects.
Don Potter provides free homeschool lesson plans for Latin, Spanish, Hebrew and Greek texts for different learning styles on his site.
Free Music Education Curriculum
Free Classical Music Lessons for kids Learn music theory, musical terminology, composers and learn to compose.
20 Homemade Musical Instruments
Hoffman Academy Piano Lessons A friend recommended these free, online lessons because her girls learned so much from them. The site includes 238 high quality video lessons for free.
Free Homeschool Curriculum – Miscellaneous Subjects
Free virtual field trips from Discovery Education
Lesson Plans on several different topics: History, Art, Science, government, Financial Literacy and more free homeschool curriculum
Free Homeschool Lesson Plans about Health
Teacher Resources from the Library of Congress
Tech lessons from Google Free homeschool curriculum for learning tech subjects
W3 Schools Free online curriculum to learn programming in several different languages (I use it myself, all the time, to keep this blog running!)
Art Lessons and projects Free homeschool curriculum for learning art
Free Mystery Lesson plans – to learn critical thinking
Millions of free books, videos, recordings and more from Archive.org There is not a single subject you couldn’t study using this resource. This is a great resource for free homeschool curriculum.
MIT Open Coursework High School and college level, they offer various subjects. These are actual classes taught through MIT, online and asynchronus. The work load is pretty tough. My son who tried a few of these classes enjoyed the content, but did not finish. He found it difficult to motivate himself. That same son excels at his in-person classes at our local university (he is still in high school) so I’m pretty sure the online format of the MIT Classes is where his difficulties lie.
Typing.com This free typing program is very effective and my kiddos enjoy the games. Each lesson includes teaching videos and practice exercises to help with typing speed. You can create a free account, which will track your child’s progress.
Free Homeschool Worksheets
If you’ve got a child who loves worksheets, you’ll find free homeschool worksheets, both printables and worksheets that can be completed online, in each of the subjects above.
Other Free Homeschool Resources
And then there is my absolute favorite resource of all — the library! I’m sure your community has resources as well — ask around and get to know other homeschooling families. We always find the very best gems in local homeschool co-ops!
Click the link below for some easy ways to find used curriculum and supplies for almost free.
It is entirely possible to homeschool your children well using strictly free homeschool curriculum. If you have the luxury of having even a small amount to spend on curriculum, make it count! I’m sure your child has a unique interest or talent in need of nurturing, because all children do. If you use free resources to cover the majority of their education, you may be able to free up funds to help them pursue their passions.
I should mention just a few more resources we use to homeschool that are not free, but cost very little for a HUGE return:
Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks Between music lessons, orchestra, homeschool co-op and sports, we spend hours each week in the car. I love that our Audible membership allows us to keep learning instead of wasting our time. We have listened to fantastic and interesting audiobooks — things that I enjoyed right along with the kids! I was amazed when my children chose Hidden Figures and enjoyed it every bit as much (even my five-year-old!) as I did. Audiobooks make ‘grown-up’ material more accessible to kids. When you sign up, you ‘ll get your first month free. You will also receive access to all of the audible channels, filled with premium podcasts you can stream.
If you have Amazon Prime, you may not know that you already receive some of the audible benefits for free with your membership. Yep! Amazon Prime members (Not a member? Try Amazon Prime free for 30 days) can enjoy unlimited FREE access to Audible Channels. With Channels you can listen to original audio series and handcrafted playlists, as well as a rotating selection of more than 50 audiobooks from Audible’s catalog! Prime members also enjoy access to a rotating list of 50 audible selections, although they will not own the books, like they would with a separate audible membership.
Amazon Prime offers other fantastic perks for homeschoolers, too (besides the 2-day free shipping it is famous for).
You will have free access to hundreds of educational documentaries through Prime Video, in addition to educational shows like Popular Mechanics for Kids, Once Upon a Time: The Explorers, and The Torchlighters. Between all of the documentaries and educational TV options, use of Prime Video is a terrific benefit for homeschoolers.
Amazon Underground is my favorite source for free high-quality Kindle apps. There are oodles of free educational apps to choose from in Amazon Underground. These apps make it easy for my kids to learn even while they’re playing.
Amazon Prime also gives you special access to more than a thousand magazines and books each month through Prime Reading. It also gives you advanced free access to new book releases. The only drawback is that you are just borrowing these books. With an audible membership, you actually get to add the books to your own personal library.
Pin this awesome list of free homeschool curriculum for later!
You’ll probably want to save this free homeschool curriculum for kindergarten, too!
Happy Homeschooling! I hope you enjoy all of this amazing free curriculum for homeschoolers! 🙂
Now that I feel comfortable to be teaching my kid at home alone… thanks!
You are welcome to include my free book about how to homeschool! You can find it at https://almostunschoolinggrama.blogspot.com/p/homeschool-on-2-hoursday-budget.html
Thanks, Sue! I’ll check it out.
Thanks for putting together this great list. I really appreciated it. This takes a lot of pressure off. My daughter will be in Kindergarten and now I’m thinking that I can totally do this.
You can! You can totally do this! Kindergarten is SUCH a fun and rewarding grade to homeschool — I’m betting you’ll fall in love with it!Did you read my kindergarten-specific posts? They have more kindergarten-specific information and free curriculum sources. You could just search for kindergarten to find them.
This is such an amazing list of free homeschool resources! I’m excited to check these out. There are some on here that I’ve never heard of.
Glad I could help, Tracy! Every little bit of free homeschool curriculum helps, right?
What an awesome list of resources! We just started our 2nd year of homeschooling our 3 kiddos so this is an amazing find! Thanks for such an awesome post!
Glad I could help, Jessica!
Kindergarten help kids to learn how to be in a class and learn in groups, how to be quiet and listen at times. In fact, for the next 12 years, children are socialized for the demands of school.
I agree with you. Kids in a school setting need to know how to line up for lunch and ask permission to use the bathroom. Classrooms would be chaos otherwise. I’m so glad that my kids get to talk out of turn and work at their own pace on subjects of their choosing! I’m grateful that our chaos is all happy, busy, independent-learning type of chaos and that we can fully embrace it.
Thanks for sharing such a great list , I really loved it.
Thanks, Rebecca! Free homeschool curriculum is always helpful, eh?
I’d love to set he article on homeschooling your kindergartener but the link won’t pull up. Thanks
Thank you for letting me know!
Excellent list with some I haven’t seen thank you, but may I suggest http://www.donpotter.net ? His website is a gem I discovered years ago while homeschooling.
He has an exhaustive array of phonics, old textbooks, downloads and manuals for reading, spelling, and writing, even handwriting . (Cursive is the lost art and usually easier to learn and execute than the perfect circles and straight lines of print) These I listed are found on his education pages but he has links and resources for Latin, music, math, and many others.
Thank you so much for the suggestion! You are right, his site is a rare gem! His training videos are just delightful! I will gratefully add his links to my list. And I agree with you about cursive handwriting. Thank you, Umm!
Wonderful list for homeschoolers to start. More than enough!
Fantastic list! We are always on the hunt for more free resources!
We are, too! Free resources really help free up the budget for other necessities and fun things, huh?
Thanks so much for this list! I’m a homeschool mom & a blogger. I had no idea about quite a few of these! Very thorough & well laid out!!
Thank you, Sharla!
This is a great list! I’m sharing with my friend. We both are hoping to homeschool this fall.
Good luck! I hope you both absolutely love homeschooling!