Homeschool science curriculum — what to use at each age

Science is the subject where homeschooling families most often buy something they did not need — and then fail to solve the one thing that genuinely does need money and planning.

Here is what to buy, and when, by age.

Ages 5–10: buy nothing

At this age science is not explanation. It is building a large library of observed phenomena that later explanations will attach to. A child who has watched ice melt at different rates on different surfaces has raw material for physics. A child who has memorised a definition of evaporation has a sentence.

What actually works, at almost no cost:

• A nature journal. A date, a place, a drawing, one sentence. Weekly, in the same patch of ground, for a year. Nothing else on this page comes close to this ratio of learning to cost.
• Library non-fiction, borrowed in armfuls. Follow whatever the child is currently obsessed with.
• Kitchen experiments with a written prediction first. The prediction is the lesson; the experiment is the illustration.
• Something alive. A plant, a wormery, a bird feeder, tadpoles.

If you want something structured anyway, the honest recommendation is a good living-books science list plus a nature study guide, not a curriculum. See living books for science and nature study.

Ages 10–13: a spine starts earning its money

Around ten, a child can hold a mechanism in their head, and explanation lands. Now sequencing matters — matter and energy before chemistry, cells before systems, forces before electricity — so a structured programme genuinely helps.

What to look for:

• A clear scope and sequence that builds rather than sampling
• Real experiments with a written prediction and a write-up, not demonstrations
• Text a child can read independently by twelve
• Honest labelling on worldview — plenty of popular science curricula are written from an explicit religious perspective, and plenty are explicitly secular. Both are fine; discovering it after you have paid is not.

Free options that work at this age: PhET simulations for physics and chemistry are university-produced, genuinely excellent, and hard to beat at any price. Pair them with a library-based biology strand and a nature journal that is now a proper field notebook.

Ages 14+: the constraint is practical work, not content

Content at this level is abundant and cheap. What is scarce is a laboratory and a supervisor whose signature an exam board accepts.

Decide two things a year ahead:

1. Which sciences, to what level. Not every teenager needs three sciences to exam standard. A student heading for engineering needs physics and maths seriously; one heading for the arts needs scientific literacy and one qualification.

2. How the practical work will happen. In rough order of how well each works:

   • A co-op or hybrid school with a lab — real equipment, real peers, real supervision
   • A lab intensive — a week or a series of weekends compressing a year of required practicals; common and well-regarded for A-level sciences
   • An accredited online course with a posted lab kit — works well for chemistry and biology, less well for physics
   • Dual enrolment at a community college — solves the lab problem and produces external credit simultaneously
   • Home labs with careful documentation — viable for biology, workable for physics, hardest for chemistry, and only if your board accepts it

The equipment worth owning

Under £250, covering ages five to fourteen.

Where to go next

• Teaching science at home — the full method, age by age
• Living books for science and nature study — the titles worth owning
• Free homeschool curriculum — the free science stack in full
• Transcripts and university admissions — how lab work is evidenced