Homeschooling is like the stairs at Hogwarts…
Homeschooling is like the stairs at Hogwarts…It likes to change. I don’t know about you other homeschooling hippie moms, but when I set out to homeschool my offspring, I had clear intentions of what I would teach, what we would do, and how my children would act.
It didn’t exactly turn out that way, because we found unschooling.
If you remember, when I pulled my kids from public school, we dove straight into unschooling for our first year. It was the best year of our lives and a great, relaxing transition from the rigidity of the classroom. As we explored our surroundings and developed a love of learning, I found my children looking for more structure.
Cyber School Homeschooling
What I love about using resources online is that there are some amazing (and most of the time free) websites for your kids to do some real learning. Plus it helps them become tech savvy and develop the ability to self-teach.
There are definitely a lot more resources that could be added to this list, but for now I’ll just share the sites & resources we use the most for our cyber school. As I discover more sites, I’ll be sure to add to this list!
MATH CYBER SCHOOL
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Khan Academy FREE
I can’t say enough good things about Khan Academy. My husband and I have researched many different math curricula, and they’re all boring to us. Some attempt to be really visual and interactive, with a lot of blocks and different visual tools. But in the end, it’s still you and them each day, hacking through math worksheets.
Khan has the BEST interactive website for learning math. It’s also very user friendly. It will test the child with mastery tests and adjust depending on your child’s strengths/weaknesses. It teaches one skill at a time and gives points for doing each skill. Within each skill is a video that explains how to do it, and hints if they can’t figure it out. To pass the level, they must get 5 questions right without hints to move on. The best part is that they are basically teaching themselves math. Our kids jump on each day, do a mastery test, then do a few skills. They do it about 30 min each day on their own.
Khan Academy also has other subjects and we just let our kids play around with them if they want – my daughter LOVES the computer programming section; it’s totally made for kids.
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FREE Interactive Math Games
ENGLISH CYBER SCHOOL
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FREE Story Starters
This is a fun site for kids to start a story and get excited about creative writing. Super easy and fun!
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FREE Writing Games
This site has some great writing games and challenges!
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Typing Instructor for Kids ($14.95)
We love this program. My nine year old types well after doing this only once! My son’s another story, but he kept looking at his fingers so we need to make him do it again and watch him closer.
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FREE Typing Racing Games
My son is obsessed with this site. He loves to race his car and try to type faster to be able to ‘purchase’ a nicer race car. Great idea and also if you have two computers your kids can race with each other.
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FREE Spelling Games
This site lets you do choose their pre-made lists or create your own. Your kids can do the test from the site itself!
HISTORY CYBER SCHOOL
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Minecraft Homeschool ($15.95 per 6 week session)
Dude. if your kid loves Minecraft — look out! Minecraft Homeschool is set up to teach history through pre-built Minecraft worlds. Each week, your child watches an assigned video about whatever history era the class is, then they answer a quiz. The quiz gets them money to spend in <inecraft, and they also are assigned builds and challenges related to that era. They have a younger class and older one. Your child has to have a Minecraft.net login and account to participate.
SCIENCE CYBER SCHOOL
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Magic School Bus Science Kits ($13.00 on Amazon)
On Amazon, these are about $13 on average. We purchase one a month. My kids LOVE it and I love it because it has all the ingredients for some stellar science projects. It also comes with a little teaching pamphlet so you can read exactly why things are happening in the experiments. It’s SUPER fun and easy to use. We don’t do any other science than this because my kids are already interested in non-fiction animal/science books. They hoard them from the library.
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GEOGRAPHY CYBER SCHOOL
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FREE Geography Songs
One thing that has really helped my kids retain what they are learning is to learn through song. We’re currently working on the United States and my kids are great at retaining the information!
Fifty Nifty States Song
States in Alphabetical Order Song
State Capitals Song
Homeschooling doesn’t have to be expensive, and you don’t have to dedicate your studies to an expensive curricula. There are LOADS of resources out there so take advantage of them and make learning fun!
YOUTUBE CHANNELS
- The Lunar Explorer – Do your kids like minecraft? Then they’ll love this kid’s adventures!
- PBS Parents – a fun resource for craft ideas and more!
- Full Time Kid – a young girl shares educational tricks and fun crafts
- Smarter Every Day – Fun science videos
Which online resources do you use for your cyber school homeschooling?
I just started reading your blog (I also get the Instagram posts… loved “totes ma goats!”). I have two year old and a one year old (thirteen months apart) and I always assumed two things: 1) I don’t have what it takes to be at home with my kids all day. 2) Public school is free and i did it so there you go that will be their route. We love their daycare, but I’ve begun thinking… really these folks aren’t doing anything that I can’t do – and there are lots of other ways for my kids to gain social skills. I work 40 hours a week outside the home and while everything at my job is okay… lately I just can’t shake this feeling that I can take the energy I spend solving problems grown people have made for themselves and invest it in helping my children enjoy learning, experience the world and grow! I’ve been beating back the feeling for about a year now… but now I’m thinking financially it makes more sense too (1700 a month – ouch, we do NOT have it like that! It’s a struggle to spend that kinda dough). Anyway I just wanted to really say thanks for making the topic approachable and giving me some food for thought. And I wanted so say that I really do enjoy reading about your experiences (as a suburban middle-unit townhouse dweller with dreams of a tiny plot of land someday). It’s a little escape from my cubicle-bound existence.
BBC has a good free typing program https://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z3c6tfr
It looks like they’ve changed the website since I’ve done it but I recognize some of it and recommend it.
These are great resources. I have used Ambleside Online for years and just started the easy peasy school. Love both.
It is so much easier now to homeschool than 10 years ago. So many resources. I love it.
Very interesting! We homeschooled for 2 years, but sent our kids to school this year… it has been an amazing decision and we feel so blessed to be a part of our wonderful, tight knit community school. I couldn’t homeschool well anymore between farming, the other little ones, home chores, and taking care of my husband’s parents (disabled and the other with cancer). We’ve been very blessed with the boys loving it and now I get to volunteer at school and be less stressed and the fun mom! haha. Best of both worlds for me and for them (I was becoming stressed, zombie mom). And now that #5 is on the way, God’s hand seems even more in the matter.
That said, before we settled on sending them to our local school, I asked my husband about online schooling and he did NOT like that… not one bit. So that exnayed cyber school (which was my last hope for homeschooling well).
I’m going to pin this though because it might be fun for the boys to do in the summer! They will love this and it’ll keep them sharp. Thanks for posting the info!!!
I love Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool at https://allinonehomeschool.com/ This mom has put her children’s school assignments online from grades 1 – 8 and then has a different site for high school. She uses the internet extensively and has made this available to the public for free. I don’t use everything and structure my lessons how I want them structured, but this is an amazing resource and springboard for my family.
Great resource Marla!
I don’t have kids, and wasn’t home schooled, but when I was about 11, my dad bought this program to teach my sister and I to type, that was similar to the racing program you mentioned, only it was starring Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach. They were racing to get something away from the main villain (Bowser?). It was fun. No idea what happened to it.
its called Mario Teaches Typing. It is considered Abandon Ware now. So if you are a little bit tech savvy you can get DosBox and the program and play it still. If not, you can do a google search and some of the games can be found on websites, beware the ads and popups on those pages.