May 10, 20235 min read

The Best Resources to Use for Homeschooling.

If you’re a busy parent, any resource that makes homeschooling easier is great. In this blog post I’m going to show you some of the best resources to use and how to use them.

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Human Body Curriculum and skeleton — Human Body Curriculum

1. YouTube: Create a playlist that goes along with your child’s curriculum. You can use it as a primary resource for an elective like Art or Music. There are many free videos teaching different topics. It’s easy to create a video playlist and add as many videos as you want to that playlist about that topic. Your child can learn an awesome new skill for free!

Outschool Class — Pre-K class from Outschool.com

2. Outschool.com: This is an online Live or pre-recorded class where your child is taught by a teacher and can learn about any number of topics. They offer one-time classes or yearlong options on specific topics or subjects. This is a good option for a parent who wants their child to be taught a specific subject by someone else. They even offer after school clubs and summer classes like book club etc.

3. An online curriculum: A full online curriculum can be extremely useful to parents for obvious reasons. It provides a full years’ worth of instruction with little to no effort from the parents. It’s a great option for parents who work full time but still want to homeschool. Some examples would be Time4learning, Mia Academy, and Power Homeschool. There are other single subject options like Teaching text or CTC Math. There are always resources for additional practice like IXL or even Kahan Academy.

4. Open AI Chat GPT: This thing is so much fun to engage with. ChatGPT can be a great resource for unschooling etc. It can lesson plan for you, provide you with meal plans or snack ideas, book discussion questions, creative writing prompts and so much more! Ask away! It even gave me a grade appropriate science curriculum outline. Just be careful asking about factual information, you still want to double check with another source. Even AI has its limitations.

5. Conventions: If there’s a convention in your area, I’d encourage you to go. A lot of times you can see resources and usually there are vendors with curriculum on hand for you to look through and ask questions. I think they’re also encouraging! Usually, they have speakers from the homeschool work to provide tips and workshops on many different topics to help parents. Some are even for families and have workshops for kids as well.

6. Local Library: If you’re new to homeschooling one of the first things I’d recommend is getting a library card. While some homeschooling families eventually collect a mountain of books, You don’t want to break the bank on tons of books you may only read once. Getting books from the library or even utilizing their story time for kids is a great way to get some socialization time and check out some fun books. We usually pick one day a week and head to the library to check out books for the next week. Since I plan our homeschooling curriculum at least a month in advance, it’s easy to know what I need when I get there. Often our librarian would pull books for me if I asked a head of time and needed things on a certain topic. Bonus: Check local thrift stores for books! People purge all kinds of fantastic books. I've been able to find almost all my Magic Tree House books from Goodwill.

mom and kids at Henry Villas Zoo with bucky badger — Henry Villas Zoo

7. Field Trips: Take trips are exciting for everyone! Depending on where you live, you might have some awesome places you never considered visiting until you started homeschooling. Take this opportunity to go on an adventure and bring to life what you’ve been learning by seeing it in real life! If you’ve been studying physical science, go to a hands-on science museum. Just started a unit study on dinosaurs, go visit a museum with a dino exhibit. Visit a local historical site or state capital building if you’re learning about local government.

8. TV: Use the TV to your advantage. I once heard a story about a parent who TV schooled their kid. Now that wasn’t the term they used, but the point is the same. They used the TV to teach their child by having them watch educational shows! Who says you can’t have your child watch the History Channel show America: The Story of Us as a part of their American History curriculum? It’s homeschooling after all, and you’re in charge. Be creative and think outside the box. There are a ton of cool shows to add into your child’s education. Like the Amazon Prime show, Inventions that shook the world. It talks about different inventions, how they came to be and what kind of impact it had on society. If you child is interested in being a vet or a zoologist, have them watch a vet or zoo show about people who work with animals daily. It will help them get a real sense of what it’s like.

Unit study planning — Unit Study planning

9. Have a Plan: Most people feel like it’s hard to plan a year at one time, but planning makes the school year run smoothly. I’d recommend planning over the summer for next year. Figure out what kind of schedule will work best for your family. Do you need a 4-day school week? Would year-round schooling work best with 6 weeks on 1 week off? This was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past. I didn’t plan my year ahead of time. It made for chaos and frustration for both me and my children. I attempted to do things at the last minute, and it just didn’t go well. We still learned things, but not as efficiently as we could have. I’m sure there were tears that could’ve been avoided as well. Here are some resources for how to properly plan a school year. We usually do unit studies for subjects like Science and History, so I’ve included a unit study free printable and a weekly schedule as an example for you. Click the Free Planning Printable >

Free Planning Printables!

10. Where can I Finding resources: When you’re planning your homeschool year there’s no need to go out and buy a ton of stuff to go along with your units. Look around your house first to see what books, games or toys you might already have that go along with your theme. You can always check out what other homeschool parents are using for that topic as well. I love searching YouTube for more resources.

These are some of the best tips and resources I've found in my homeschooling years. Check out my YouTube channel for videos on how I use these resources to plan my homeschool year!

Check out my latest Video on YouTube

Our 1st Grade Literature Based Language Arts Curriculum choice for 23-24 school year!