Hello, I'm hoping I can help you in your homeschooling travels. If you are wondering, our family has been homeschooling our autistic son since 2006. We've had many ups and downs, sometimes feeling like we were on a roller coaster but I wouldn't do a thing differently. On my blog, I hope to share my favorite homeschooling sites, explain the many different styles of homeschooling, and generally help you out as much as I can. I don't do boxed curriculum so if you plan to do that to homeschool, I may not be able to help you much. I can share a list of different sites where you can find free materials including entire homeschooling programs. Yes, they are out there and you CAN homeschool for nearly nothing! I don't think it's possible to homeschool totally free and if anyone can, I would love to know how they do it. If anything, there's the cost of printing, paper, pens, and pencils but I do think it's possible to homeschool for cheaper than the cost to send children to public school. Just think how much you can spend every year on the cost of school clothes and the usual long wish list the teachers expect you to purchase at the beginning of each school year.
An explanation of all the different styles of homeschooling can be quite long and lengthy so let me write about that in another post. Let's cover my favorite sites that I use to homeschool:
Gutenberg.org/ is probably my absolute favorite site. I enjoy reading and like using quite a few books with our son. I've downloaded so many free books from this site that I couldn't even start to count them all. I wouldn't even want to try. Some of the books I've downloaded and used with are son are the complete McGuffey Reader collection to teach our son to read. I've also downloaded books about classical composers, science, math, and many classical fiction books. Let me give you a list of the books I've downloaded and read with our son JUST for the enjoyment of reading to him: Alice in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and many, many more, just to name a few. Now to explain the site. Copyrights are only good for a certain period of time. Once they expire, they become public domain. All the books on this site are so old that their copyrights have expired and they are in the public domain. You will only find those kind of books on this site, but don't let fool you there are so many things that really don't change through the years that the books will still be useful to homeschool with them. After all, addition, subtraction, and other basic math skills haven't changed and neither has how to teach a child to read. We actually use McGuffey Readers to teach our son to read and it's been very successful.
Currclick.com is another wonderful site I enjoy accessing at LEAST once a week. There are thousands of free homeschooling items you can get for free off the site along with a weekly free item. They are easily accessed off the site from the left margin, there is a free button you can click on to find them! It's easy to find, after all it says free on it. The weekly free item is always listed on the home page, toward the top, in the middle section, on the right. Now there are also low cost and expensive homeschool materials on the site, but the free items are quite useful. I'll also give a list later with links to my free items from this site too.The site also does many sales throughout the year you can access and frequently during most of the sales, they also offer free items that usually are charged for.
http://dynamic2moms.webs.com/ is a wonderful site where I've downloaded free lapbooks, notebooking pages, and unit studies. The ladies that post the materials they have created for their children and homeschool groups are wonderful but most of it is in color which means that it can cost quite a bit more to actually print when you want to use them. That's the only drawback I have ever had with this site because the color booklets for the lapbooks are really beautiful. Especially the rainforest lapbook that is available with booklets for both younger and older children. I look here for lapbooks and unit studies before I waste money purchasing something to use for what we are currently teaching our son!
WWW.HomeschoolShare.com is another site I usually go to when I'm preparing for doing a unit study. I've found some really great lapbooks there along with unit studies themselves. I've also found free templates to make my own lapbooks there too. Most of the lapbooks I've downloaded are in black in white but I've also done a few in color too.
WWW.LapbookLessons.com is another site where you can download free materials but a majority of them will have a Christian perspective. You may or may not want to homeschool using Christian materials but if you do, this is a wonderful site to find materials to use.
WWW.educents.com/rewardsref/index/refer/id/42725 is another site where I've found some good bargains for homeschooling. At least once a week, usually on Fridays, the site offers free items too. The items you will find on the site will run the full gambit, from kindergarten to high school. Just about any subject you can think of, from the basics like English, math, and science to fun stuff, like juggling and art.
Well, this is my list as far as I can think of although there may be many more useful sites where you can find free materials to homeschool. If I think of more, I'll add them to my list. I know that I've mentioned several sites where you can download free lapbooks and may be wondering what they are. I'll write about them soon too. I know, I've mentioned several things that may help you start homeschooling and I promise that I'll write about them as soon as I can. Please write a comment or question if I can help you. I know I really could have used a friend when we started homeschooling who could have answered all my questions or told me about a few sites that would have been helpful. That's why I've started this blog, to help those who need some help starting to homeschool.
