Free homeschool curriculum — a complete year, every subject, no cost

Almost every “free homeschool curriculum” list is padded with printables nobody uses and worksheet mills. This one is restricted to things that could carry a subject for a full year, with honest notes on where each falls short.

The trade is worth naming up front: free curricula cost time. Paid programmes sell you sequencing and scripted teacher guidance. If your constraint is time rather than money, buy the two spines and use this list for everything else.

Math

Khan Academy — the strongest free resource in existence for homeschooling. Complete and sequenced from counting to calculus, with video instruction, adaptive practice and mastery tracking, plus a parent dashboard. Used as the spine rather than a supplement, it removes the largest line from most budgets.

Weakness: screen-based, and light on written practice. Fix it with free printable worksheets and require workings on paper. See our honest review.

Free printable worksheet generators — for drilling a specific skill to fluency, set at the exact level you need. Use alongside, not instead of.

Real-world math — cooking, shopping, building, budgeting, board games. Not a curriculum, but a genuine and under-used source of applied practice, especially for a child who has decided they hate maths.

Reading and phonics

Free structured phonics programmes exist and are used successfully by thousands of families. Look for explicit, systematic, cumulative sequences rather than sight-word or “balanced literacy” approaches.

Public-domain readers — the classic graded readers are out of copyright, free to download and print, and remain well-sequenced for early decoding practice.

Your library for everything after decoding: readers, early chapter books, and the read-alouds that build the vocabulary reading comprehension depends on.

Writing

Costs nothing by design, and no purchase improves on it before about ten:

• Copywork from whatever you are reading. Two lines at six, five at nine.
• Dictation from the same passages, from about eight.
• Narration after every read-aloud, from five.
• Real letters to real people who write back.

From about ten, a structured programme starts earning its place, because the paragraph-to-essay progression is genuinely technical. Until then, see teaching writing at home.

History

The library, arranged chronologically. Pick an era, borrow eight books across reading levels, spend six weeks there, move on. This works better than most paid history curricula.

A timeline on the wall. A roll of lining paper down a hallway. Every book you read, every person you meet, gets a card. Free, and it does the single most useful thing a history curriculum does.

Free primary source collections — national archives, museum digital collections and university repositories all publish enormous quantities of material free. Genuinely transformative from about twelve.

Documentaries, borrowed from the library or available free from public broadcasters.

Science

Under ten, buy nothing. A nature journal, weekly outdoor observation, library non-fiction and kitchen experiments outperform most elementary science curricula. See teaching science at home.

PhET simulations — free, university-produced interactive physics and chemistry, excellent from about eleven and genuinely hard to replicate at any price.

Citizen science projects — real data collection contributing to real research. Highly motivating for teenagers, and free.

Local nature reserves and museums — most run free weekday education sessions, and most are under-booked.

Weakness: lab science for exam-track teenagers is the one place free genuinely runs out. Budget for a lab intensive, a co-op or an online course with a posted kit.

Languages

Free apps for exposure and vocabulary. Useful, and not sufficient alone.

Library audio courses — most library systems carry full language courses free.

Language exchange — a conversation partner, free, and worth more than any app. This is how languages are actually learned.

Public broadcaster language material — several national broadcasters publish full free courses.

Art and music

Virtual museum collections — most major museums publish high-resolution images free. Picture study needs nothing more: one painting, displayed for a week, discussed once.

Free classical recordings for composer study — one composer a term, played during breakfast.

Drawing instruction — free structured drawing courses exist and are surprisingly good.

Materials are the only real cost: paper, pencils, and a tin of decent paint that lasts two years.

Complete open-source curricula

Several fully free, complete curricula exist covering all subjects with day-by-day lesson plans. They vary widely in religious framing, so check that before committing a year. Search for “open source homeschool curriculum” plus “secular” or “Christian” as appropriate, and read a full sample week before adopting one.

What free cannot replace

Honesty matters more than enthusiasm here:

1. Structured literacy for a struggling reader. Buy it.
2. Scripted open-and-go guidance when you are exhausted, working, or teaching a subject that frightens you. Paid programmes sell this and it is worth paying for.
3. Lab science with a practical endorsement for exam-track teenagers.
4. External credentials. Exams cost money, and there is no free route to a recognised qualification in most systems.
5. A peer group. This is not curriculum, and it matters more than curriculum.

The assembly plan

If you are starting from nothing:

1. Get a library card and meet the children’s librarian. Tell them you home educate. This one conversation is worth more than the rest of this list.
2. Set up Khan Academy and place your child by taking the diagnostic honestly.
3. Pick a phonics sequence if you have an early reader, and do fifteen minutes a day.
4. Start copywork and narration. Today. No preparation required.
5. Put up a timeline and pick your first history era.
6. Get outside weekly with a notebook.
7. Add one paid thing only when free has demonstrably failed — and then buy it properly.

Where to go next

• Homeschooling on a budget — the wider strategy, including buying used
• Libby and your library — how to run the library as a system
• Khan Academy for homeschoolers — using free math as the main event
• Homeschool cost calculator — what your year actually costs