On a tight budget this year? Delve into the plethora of free resources and discover high quality lessons that are better than many costly pre-packaged curriculum. However, going the low and no-cost route involves lots of extra planning, organizing and gathering, so take some time this summer and get started!
Here are the basic items needed to create your own curriculum for a 38-week school year:
- Parent and student binders with tabs for weekly lessons and three-hole punch for binding printouts.
- Printer and printer paper
- Public Library card
- Internet access
- Time
Using our 38-week method, start by identifying subjects you are planning to teach using this method.
Next, decide upon weekly topics (you will need 38 if you choose a different topic for each week). For language arts, we choose topics such as ‘word fun’, parts of speech, art and literature, etc. You can be more or less specific — just be creative! We use a calendar to help design lessons around significant events, holidays, etc. For example, April is national poetry month, so we create a one week language arts lesson around different aspects of poetry.
Next, using some of our resources listed below, find and adapt lessons that fit into your topics. We use a word processing program to organize our teacher and student versions of each lesson, print them and organize them by week into binders.
There is so much information available online that it is time consuming to identify the best sources. We have taken quite a bit of time researching good sources and are adapting lessons from many of the following online websites. Some of the lessons require supplements, such as suggested reading, and the public library should have the vast majority of these materials. Also, don’t be afraid to take a basic idea from a lesson plan and change or extend it to make it your own!
ONLINE LESSON PLANS
Artsedge
Very high quality lesson plans make up part of this website. The lessons put art at the center of the lesson, and many lessons incorporate math, science, history, etc. You may have to adapt some of these for homeschool use, but they are definitely worth the effort. Art is extremely vital to society and contributes to a prosperous community — we highly recommend these lessons!
The Lesson Plan Page
HotChalk’s lesson plan page boasts over 3500 free lesson plans on all subjects. The lesson plans vary in quality, but many are worth adapting for the homeschool curriculum.
Teacher’s Domain
Very high quality lesson plans for the sciences. Most of these lessons can be adapted for homeschoolers and most include some multimedia components for teachers and students.
NSDL (National Science Digital Library) Middle School Science Portal
Really detailed and complete lessons and associated background material for middle school-aged students. These can easily be adapted for homeschool use and are of the highest quality.
NeMO (New Millenium Observatory)
The Case of the Missing Rumbleometer is a four part lesson that takes kids through scientific investigation of an undersea volcano and it’s impacts on undersea hotsprings. There are html, powerpoint and .pdf versions of this lesson. Note: This could be a one week lesson all by itself.
Lesson Plan Search
This site boasts over 2,300 lesson plans. Most can be adapted to homeschooling.
National Geographic Xpeditions
Easy to adapt to homeschooling, these geography-centric lessons are very well written and much of the lesson materials are available online.
The Educator’s Reference Desk
Just click on a subject of interest to view a list of lesson plans available. Click on the ‘Interdisciplinary’ link for some fun, creative lessons combining multiple subjects!
Posted in 
