How to Create a Free Homeschool Curriculum

Homeschooling provides you the opportunity to tailor your child’s curriculum to their particular learning styles, as well as their interests and skill levels. You may find that the homeschool curriculum offered does not quite match what the child wants to learn. Most purchased curriculum tell you what and how to teach particular lessons. Why not develop your own curriculum and tailor it to your child's interests and abilities?

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Internet access
• Printer
• Registered library card
• Binder, 1.5" size per lesson
• Hole punch
• Time and patience

1. Define your child's interests and what they want to learn about. Keep tabs on what books are their favorites, TV shows that they watch, and what magazines they seem fond of. Ask them what topics are of interest to them.

2. Incorporate appropriate literature into the curriculum. You can do this by checking out what WOWIO, which is a virtual library online that offers many eBooks on lots of subjects. They allow you to download up to five eBooks a day. Just download and print the eBook(s) that you want for the lesson, and place it in the binder. You can, of course, also use your library as a resource, if needed.

3. Add educational and fun activities that pertain to the lesson. Good sources for this information would be Enchanted Learning and ABC Teach. They offer plenty of free activities based on many, many subjects. They are free websites, but to get the most out of them, however, you will need to pay a small membership fee that is good for one year. Print out your activities and place them in the binder.

4. Print some blank lined pages with fancy borders to add to the binder, so your child can take notes and answer questions that you come up with for the lesson she is learning. You can find this bordered paper at ABC Teach or DLTK. Just print it off and add it to the binder.

5. Add some arts and crafts to your lesson, depending on your child's age, by visiting places like DLTK and Kaboose for great project ideas. Some kids learn better when they are able to do hands-on crafts that go along with the lesson they are learning. Plus, it just adds some fun to schoolwork. You may even find yourself coming up with your own great ideas as you are putting the lesson together.

6. Lastly, adding supplemental math is something you should consider when creating a lesson plan. It helps to reinforce math concepts, even though it is not a math curriculum that you are designing. BINGO and flash cards are popular with kids. You can create your own BINGO cards at DLTK, and ABC Teach offers printable flash cards. Again, print them out and add to the binder. Keep BINGO pieces and flash cards in the binder by inserting them into page protector sheets that will fit into the binder easily.

Tips & Warnings

• You may want to start by designing one subject on your own, and work yourself up to creating an entire curriculum in the future.
• Don't go overboard with your lesson planning. It is easy to get carried away when you see all that the Internet has to offer. Remember your child's skill level, too, when choosing activities.
• Make sure you fall within your state's guidelines when developing your own curriculum, and that you are still meeting the requirements of the law.