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| The lava lamp experiment is from the chemistry set I have listed on my 5th grade page from Home Science Tools. I combined a 10% off sale with a $40 credit that they offered during a bonus Christmas sale on a microscope. My grandmother paid for the children’s microscope as a Christmas gift and had me order it; I used the credit later to order the chemistry kit. |
Homeschooling, by its very nature, has some costs savings. By teaching children at home, I don’t spend money on:
Gas (and wear and tear on the car) to drive the children to school and back (it also makes it easier to be a one-car family!)
Backpacks
School lunches, including lunch boxes, sandwich bags, individually packaged treats, or the high cost of purchasing lunch at school. (Our meals at home are usually soup and homemade bread, or leftovers, but sometimes sandwiches, salad from the garden, or bean burritos. Lunch for the family usually costs me $.50 to $1.00 for all seven of the children and myself.)
Classroom supplies
School fundraisers
School uniforms (many of the public schools in my area require uniforms)
Tuition
The latest fashion trends (my children don’t know what those are, so there are no requests for a “certain” pair of shoes or a “certain” pair of jeans).
I do, however, buy curriculum.
When people find out I homeschool, the first question they always ask is, “What curriculum do you use?”
I don’t believe in buying a “boxed” curriculum for many reasons. One, you’re paying for someone else to pick your books, when you can just as easily pick them yourself. Two, you’re paying full price for every book. Three, the boxed purchase means that you are buying some books again and again, each time another child in your family reaches that grade. I don’t need a new math book, a new English book, a new science book, new reading books, etc. for every child for every grade; I can pass books down, and they only have to be purchased once. This is a huge cost savings.
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Some ways that I have saved money in purchasing our curriculum:
1. Buy used
There are many ways to do this. Homeschool forums usually have a place where people can buy and sell their used books. Amazon
2. Buy on sale
Most homeschool suppliers have regular sales on certain products throughout the year, but especially in spring (when many people are looking to purchase for the following year) and again in August. Some retailers always have certain books at discounted prices throughout the year. In addition, many retailers offer free shipping or additional discounts (usually these come in their catalogs, but some will also let you know of a deal if you receive their emails).
Amazon’s
Some regular sales that I have seen: Christian Book usually has sales on different publishers on a regular basis (they also have Black Friday sales). Home Science Tools has sales on a regular basis, on top of their low prices. Their service has been phenomenal and they have flat rate shipping of $6.95. They have great sales at Christmas time, too. Scholastic’s Teacher Express site has a $1 sale a few times a year, where a large portion of their downloadable books are $1 each (this is when I purchased my activity books from them that you see listed on my fourth grade page, as well as the geography books from them for several grades). Because they are printable, once you download them, you can use them for every child quite easily.
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| This is Liberty two years ago doing her kindergarten math, which I printed from The Math Worksheet Site. |
3. Don’t buy it at all
The library may have many of the books you need, especially literature and science books. You may find the exact books you want, or you may be able to find others that will work just fine (our library has a lot of science books that include experiments). If your library doesn’t have the books you want, you may be able to request them through interlibrary loan.
Hand-me-downs can work for books as well as clothing! If you have friends who are teaching children older than yours at home, they might offer you their old books. We have received several books this way.
Swapping books that you no longer need is another way to get books. You can do it locally, or online (in which case you would need to pay book rate shipping).
There are also vast resources for school that you can access online for free. I mentioned recently that we found a free online typing class. I have a list of several free sources for all sorts of subjects (including math, English, science, spelling, art, penmanship, music and more) on my website’s Homeschool Sources page. Some sites are always free. For some, you will need to print pages for your child. Some sites have a limited number of free pages, but have more available for a subscription fee (which can be month or a year, so you can try it out for a month to see if it is worth it or not to you).
A note on printing: I print quite a few pages each day. My printer is a laser printer, and it only prints black. Using a laser printer instead of an ink jet printer saves me a lot, as does using a black and white printer over a color printer. The cartridges that I buy
Paper sales are best at back to school time. This week Office Max has a box of 10 reams (500 sheets each) of paper on sale for $25. (Regular price is $35). We use computer paper for painting, drawing, and origami, as well as for printing.
This week I updated our curriculum lists to reflect what we are using for each grade. You can find those on my website. For simplicity’s sake I am listing the links to each grade here:
A little homeschool encouragement
We homeschool year-round. If you don’t homeschool year-round, when do you start school?
This post contains affiliate links. A big thank you to those of you who have made purchases through my links; the credit I earn helps me to pay for schoolbooks!
How can they require this? Tax dollars should at least pay for one book per child. I always took my books home; there was never a classroom set. My high school backpack was very heavy, because I had to take everything home, but that was normal.
I’m going to check Ebay, Craigslist, and Freecycle for the calculator–new ones are running $108 on Amazon, though there may be used ones available, I haven’t yet checked. In middle school, the kids each had TWO textbooks-one for home and one for the classroom AND they were able to access the book online if they had a home computer or other device. I’m not sure how the high school operates yet since this is our first year in but I’m going to assume it’s about the same so I’m not even sure why they would require a laptop or equivalent?I live in a very affluent town where there aren’t many in need, though the numbers have risen over the past few years. Just this past year they voted to increase the school budget by $1 million dollars even though enrollment has steadily declined by 600 students over the last 5 or so years. They stated the reason for the increase was to provide more school security (Newtown, CT where the school shooting happened in December is our neighboring town) and for added technology like ipads and netbooks, etc. So the budget increased, our taxes increased, and now they want us to spend more money out of our own pockets to pay for something they were supposed to have accounted for. It’s just ridiculous. My son has an ipod that he got for Christmas last year and a Kindle Fire that he bought with his own money and both have wi-fi so we’re going to see if those are “acceptable” devices. The schools here use Google docs instead of Word, Excel, etc. so the documents are saved online and can be accessed from anywhere so I can’t see that it would be a problem. If so, the school is going to have to come up with a solution because I can’t imagine we are the only family who can’t afford it…
So is it a typo or do your 4th and 7th graders truly share math? I was looking at 7th grade curious as to what you use for algebra since my oldest is starting 7th grade as well and is doing algebra next.Due to a huge decrease in pay in the past 6 months, we are borrowing curriculum from our homeschool library which is a HUGE blessing right now. We’re using the 7th and 4th grade Sonlight curriculum and my younger children will listen in on the 4th grade readalouds and do their own levels of math (Singapore, inexpensive), phonics, reading, etc… . Fortunately, we had bought Rosetta Stone before things got so tight so they’ll continue that for Spanish, along with my oldest doing Latina Christiana 2 (and concurrently taking Latin 2 at our homeschool co-op). We were blessed by my dad with a used laptop from his work (they auction them off) which we will put the kids’ schoolwork items on this year. Still hoping to purchase Teaching Textbooks level 4 for my 4th grader and have purchased a used copy of TT Algebra for my oldest (still looking b/c I didn’t realize when buying that it doesn’t cover quadratic equations).We actually started a bit in July for this year-round year but were still finishing up last year’s math at that time. My daughter went to visit her grandparents in Florida but will be back next week and we’ll get back to schoolwork as well.It’s always interesting to read what others are doing and to glean ideas.
We are the same. Not quite as hot as your area but still normally in the 100’s so we take our breaks when we can enjoy more time outside.
That’s a typo! I was certain I fixed that but I must not have hit save when I updated it this week. I hope I didn’t miss anything else there! I will fix that; thanks!Saxon says that after the 7/6 book, you can do the 8/7 for slower math students, or the pre-algebra (Saxon calls it Algebra 1/2). I’m planning on doing the pre-algebra. We’ll be ready to move to the next grade in about 6 weeks for the three oldest, and Liberty already moved on to 2nd grade. Wren and Elsa are both doing the same work, which is really strange, because Elsa is 3. She wants schoolwork and she recognizes more letters than Wren and almost as many numbers. So, I am just teaching them together. If she can keep up, we’ll keep going; if not, I’ll give her slightly different work.
Elsa sounds very bright! It’s nice to be able to group the younger ones together for some areas. My 3, 5, and just turned 7 year olds will be doing the same in some aspects. The 3 and 5 YO will do the same math (Singapore K) and reading curriculum, but the 5 YO is way ahead on writing. Funny how it all works out and that doesn’t matter when we’re grown. :)I’m not super familiar with Saxon (have looked at it but not tried it). We did pre-Algebra for 6th so will follow that with Algebra for 7th. But Teaching Textbooks also has those for higher grades. I had her take the placement tests when we went to TT and she placed into pre-Algebra so we went with it.
Love your posts, thank you. I’m wondering if you could please clarify how you prolong your printer cartridge. We also have a laser jet printer. What is the reader hole? Thanks!
this is our first year doing homeschool year round. We took a couple of weeks off for camps and to visit family. We are finishing math with my oldest and my youngest has religion, math, and spelling to finish. I like the year round. I always have the need to finish an entire book before moving to the next subject. I like reading about the savings that come with homeschooling. I would add that we are able to travel during off season. Thanks for posting the list of items you use for each grade. I like adding books to our reading list.This year we will be getting a chemestry set and combining the science for 3rd and 5th grade. we always start with great ideas about what we are going to do for the school year but around November we drop one or two elective subjects (such as latin, art, music)
I agree with Brandy that this new double sets of textbooks thing is strange, to say the least. Back in dinosaur days when I was in school, textbooks were free, on loan, through eighth grade. ONE set. For high school, we had to buy our books, but could sometimes buy used, and could resell them to the school book store at the end of the year. (Now books are free here through high school.)I just recently learned from a friend that in our town, the school buys the two sets of books per student “because the books are so heavy” to carry around. To me, this is just nonsense. Learning to manage your books, and have the right books in the right place at the right time, was just part of learning to think ahead and prepare to function in the real world.Of course, this was before every student walked around looking like a turtle with a back pack on. You just carried your books in your arm. Boys commonly started getting acquainted with girls by offering to carry their books. Such a civilized custom.
I hope that one day we can travel during the off-season. I think September/October travel out of state (to a cooler state where the leaves actually change colors; here they turn brown in December and fall) would be ideal.
Take it out, shake it up to redistribute the toner, and then there is a wire that you clean by running the little slide thing (sorry I don’t remember the actual name of it) just like you do when it is brand-new. Put a piece of dark tape over the little hole in the side (it’s like a little window where the printer reads to tell you that the cartridge needs to be replaced) and it reads as full. It will still be obvious when the cartridge is out of toner when you are printing, but I get another couple of months from it this way.
You know I love your curricula/book lists! And your pictures!! 🙂
Personally I love school uniforms. They’re very cheap (my daughter’s dresses cost about $5 each; the shirts are $2 each) or sometimes free (the school does a school uniform exchange where you bring in uniforms your kids have outgrown and swap for the next size up). I love that there is no pressure to dress up or have nice clothes for school. It also does away with morning arguments of “I have nothing to wear.” Uniforms are a great equalizer.Also, I stumbled upon my new favourite website today and thought I’d share – hundreds of books you can just open up and read on your computer, for free! What’s not to love? http://www.wegivebooks.org
Wow this is so timely kind of post…learning a lot here though I am sending my son to a private School, I liked the uniforms as well even though I had to spend money on it buying part of it from a particular retailer. He is kindergarten so far so we have a long way to go.this school had a uniform exchange earlier in the summeer that helped me set off the expenses quite abit. I cannot say I did be that blessed year after year but we will see…I wanted to also say that for my son he had no interest in traditional books and method to read and learn numbers.However I stumbled on a site called readingseggs.com and it helped with his reading and numbers in a very fun way over the summer and $25 for three months subscription seemed fair for that progress. Maybe some kids respond better that way and I could see it being used for homeschooling.Sheeba
Reading Eggs is amazing; my kids love it! A lot of schools (at least over here) pay for the kids’ memberships; otherwise they often have free 6 or 12 week trials. My kids also love Spellodrome but if you’re an American you might want to exercise caution in using that site as American and Australian English have slightly different spelling (eg “s” instead of “z” for words like realise/realize, or “re” instead of “er” in words like “centre/center”). I think there’s also a math one, but I’ll have to ask my daughter for the name.
In the last photo, did you print a gray scale copy of a photo and then watercolor over it? That looks like a fun project!
Only my then 2-year-old painted it that way. The others used it to do their own paintings by tracing over it. This is the project: http://growcreative.blogspot.com/2012/09/easy-watercolor-portrait-tutorial.html I did a painting of Ivory with it. I ended up doing mine a little differently than she did, as I used Photoshop and had some different tools; I left in more than she did so that I could better see areas of more paint, which I found really helpful. I did a painting that day as well, of Ivory. It was really fun. She has several other great watercolor tutorials on her site.
LOL this is the third time I have typed this so it may sound terrible. Sorry. Google is acting weird.Anyway…Our district is likely last in the nation for per pupil spending. We rarely have individual textbooks per child and haven’t for years except in math maybe, we have classroom sets. There also hasn’t been any online access for most books, with the exception of math. It doesn’t seem fair to require children to find their own facts for a worksheet, but then test them from the text they have little to no access from.This year the school is planning to have a set of classroom ipads for texts with online access for home use. I can’t provide enough computers/time on screens for as many children as I have, nor do I want my children looking at a screen that much in a day.Of course our new school buildings and new district building with cherrywood furniture and granite counters/desk tops throughout are quite beautiful. I’m just not sure the opportunity cost of not providing materials to educate our children is worth it.
Penelope, you said that so well.My entire middle school was portable buildings (including the principal’s office and the nurse’s office, which were the same building). We had one bathroom that was part of a public pool that the elementary school used for P.E.My high school had a large number of students, but we had no cafeteria (one tiny little kiosk-sized area that cooked some food but usually ran out of food before everyone could go through the line, which was one line on each side of the kiosk). There were a few tables, but not enough for hundreds of students. I had lunch on the ground everyday, brought from home; the two times I tried to buy lunch they ran out of anything besides fries (the lunch they sold was a few things, including a chicken sandwich and fries, and one other hot sandwich).We had no hallways; we had separate buildings.There was only one bathroom open for the entire school of several hundred students; they locked the other bathrooms because some students had damaged them. If you needed to use the bathroom you often could not in time.We had to go to the community college for our football games and our graduation ceremonies because we did not have a place to play at our own school.Our lockers were too small for all of our books so I had to carry many of those heavy books around even when I didn’t need them for class.So the amazing demands that you and others are mentioning just floor me.
Brandy, I am very grateful for you continuing to provide this information. After a series of difficulties and serious issues throughout last year, I read through your home school page encouragement and it made a difference for me. It helped give me the courage to just go ahead with it when I knew I should be. The school district starts this week, and we are not going. I have spent months trying to figure it all out and much of what we will do is inspired if not directly from your list.I have been given a great opportunity by way of an educational liaison that supports homeschooling and funnels our educational tax dollars towards curriculum for home use.Any suggestions as to specific chemistry materials, like a kit or something else? I am a little overwhelmed right now and not sure where to start on this. My oldest 2 will be taking honors chemistry through the BYU independent study H/S so we will all study it (K-11). I have a limited amount of money that I would like to have cover chemistry AND biology/physics materials just in case we take the entire plunge into home school next year away from the liaison.I also made a trip to the Seminary building to sign up my 2 H/S aged children. They were super easy to work with.
Check out Home Science Tools for Chemistry kits. They have a few different kits, plus they have all sorts of other chemistry supplies, and their prices are great. They have a free shipping code right now for orders over $99 if you have to spend that much: PB2S13 Otherwise shipping is a flat rate of $6.95. You can see what supplies your class requires and if you need to order anything extra to meet your requirements. Chemistry is a LOT of fun! We are loving it here!
They have some great things for biology, too, including dissection kits, if your program requires that.
I so need this this year!!! We would love it if you would link up at our linky party:http://www.lifewiththecrustcutoff.com/two-girls-and-a-party-linky-party-30/Live every Wednesday to Sunday.Hosted by:http://www.lifewiththecrustcutoff.com/ Parrish @ Life with the Crust Cut Offhttp://thissillygirlslife.com/ Dana @ This Silly Girl’s LifeWe hope to see you there!
Thank you so much for the link and ideas! I appreciate it.
Most of our chemistry experiments for younger kids involve household chemicals…like borax, vinegar, baking soda, etc. I bought measuring spoons/cups at the dollar store and keep extra plastic containers for things, plus I bought two beakers for $7 each from Amazon for things that might be reactive.