How many resources can you list for home-schooling besides those found on the internet?

Question

I did a search on Yahoo and found "19,600,000 for homeschool resources". If we tried to use even one tenth of the available materials we would be studying grades K thru 12 until we are over 90 years old!

It is wonderful to have so many great educational opportunities for an at-home education!

Answer 1

Internet: Searching only on "homeschool resources" does not include all the internet resources available.  Lots of things available to anyone do not come up under that keyword...

So, add to the list, searches such as:

Educational shareware

Educational freeware

[subject] resources --- where [subject] is English, History, Biology, etc.

Tutor

Tutorial

Webquest

Learning resources

Etc.

Also - .gov sites are great for top quality free resources for kids! Many have great learning resources - try whitehouse.gov or loc.gov (library of congress), NASA is good, NOAA is good, etc.

Your ~20Million becomes more like several billion Internet resources.

How many educational resources are there in the real world? So many open to anyone ready, willing and able to take advantage of them!

State and national parks (lots of free programs)

Living history museums

Plants, animals, rocks...

Libraries

Community centers

Book stores

Home improvement stores (many offer classes often for free)

All the clubs (4H, Little League, Gavel Club) that are very affordable.

DVDs / Videos

Volunteering opportunities

So much to do and learn! So many ways to learn! So much that is 100% free.  

Boggles the mind.

Makes the head spin.

***UPDATE:

Do this goodle search: "kids site:.gov"

It returns nearly 1/2 a million .gov sites just for kids.

Also, kids.gov looks to be a cool site...

Answer 2

Our statewide homeschool organization has a conference once a year.   There are three days of workshops/lectures and a bookstore with over 200 vendors.  All the vendors have free catalogs and most have free 'samples'.   The conference booklet contains advertisements for many local opportunities.  The conference offers notes from all the speakers and CD's of the lectures are available for a small price.  We enjoy going to conference but we have never bought anything from the vendors but it just shows the amount of resources available.

We are very frugal in our spending for homeschool.  We get many trashed items from the public school.   Even with using only free and cheap we have an abundance of resources and our main problem is deciding which ones to use.

Adding to YSN's websearch items would be "free online video lectures" and "free online audio lectures".

I love the Annanberg Learning sites especially for History.  You can watch the video series and go to website for suggested activities and discussion questions.  Love it!  Makes learning easy and my job as teacher easier.

Answer 3

YES GO TO WWW.STRATFORD UNIVERSITY ONLINE FOR INFO. ITS CHEAP AND EASY. HOPE THIS HELPS

Answer 4

It is wonderfully convenient (most of the time). Whenever I go to the library, I always feel like...well...me : library :: kid : candy store I suppose. Just so much information, so many sources of knowledge, insight, research, discovery, information... It gets me rather excited and it makes me feel really good about being home schooled and about education in general.

Then there are all the people in my community whom I can turn to for all of the above... Carpenters, musicians, stage actors, artists, doctors, occupational therapists, college professors, bankers, mechanics, business owners, computer programmers, child psychologists... Any field I want ot learn more about, all I have to do is find someone in the community, contact them, and be willing to speak up and ask questions, maybe even ask if there are any job shadowing opportunities available to me. There are resources everywhere, really. Online and off. You just have to know how to find them and use them.

Answer 5

Library (almost anything you are looking for)

Experienced Friends (good advise is always welcome)

Co-Op (meeting mom's with more experience is useful)

Teacher's Stores (grade books, sentence blocks, and work books, not to mention it's fun to browse)

Walmart (workbooks for elementary ages)

Books A Million (Almost every book imaginable)

B. Dalton (might be the closest book store)

Walden Books (are they still around? I haven't seen one in years)

The Older Generations ( Want a WW2 lesson talk to grandpa if he's still around and old enough)

Video Games (such as Age Of Empires anything that teaches and is fun)

Home School Conventions (where else will you find vast quantities of resources to look at and be over whelmed by)

It's great to know there are so many resources out there for us.

Answer 6

I suggest your kichen for reading recipes and weighing and measuring. Your streets to challenge reading names and spelling them, and for directions, your grocery list for shopping and handling money and comparing prices, your local mall to find as many words as possible to read or to try to read, the stores for learning which shops sell which items, how to size clothes, to evaluate which clothes are suitable for which seasons, vocabulary practice making up phases or word from car numbers, adding , subtracting or multiplying car registration numbers, estimating weights and heights of people passing by.

Ask him to make up a story about a little boy crying .Why? What happened next? And even What could you do?

Imagine you are allowed to creep into the Three Bears'Home in the book shop.Wow! What's different?   Visit the hardware store.

You have a marvellous challenge which can be fun  for all of you.  Make an excursion a special treat each week or each fortnight.  You can go and sit by the roadside and watch the men work. Such wonderful opportunities to make the whole of his world a wonderful learning place. I envy you this chance.Your finished product will be a joy to know. I 'd love to  meet (him or her). Get him to write to someone on the computer - proper spelling and punctuation though.

This of course would be random learning and not to replace the boring old reading and tables etc. But if you are ble to develop it according to your time constraints, it could easily replace the majority of the ordinary stuff as he will know so much more and have been challenged so much further than a child in a class of 20.

I enjoyed talking to you.

Answer 7

Oooh!!!  Yep, Christmas morning here!

I am getting so many ideas, I'm kinda bummed I can't look through them till after church, lol!

Added to that, there are also online co ops through various curriculum companies that are free (Hands of a Child is one of them) where hs parents from all over the world pick a unit, take on a job, and then share their findings.  The company then puts together a free planner and makes graphics for the activities.  I've gotten enough stuff off of there - covering every subject - to last us for years.

Then there are BSA badges (we build units around those like you wouldn't believe) and history/science units from national parks (also free).  There are museums and nature centers here in town that have free and way cheap (like $2) programs for kids, which are led by experts that are only too happy to take an interested kid under their wing.  

My MIL works at a university here in town, and the professors are willing to help out many of the local homeschool kids.  They run field trips through their department (like a geology museum on campus), and often invite some of the kids to things like being a model for a figure drawing class (once their time is done, they get to draw with the rest of the class).  My son loves these!

There are also drama and theater groups...because homeschoolers tend to have a more flexible schedule, our community theaters actually keep a roster and call the kids when they're needed for a part.

Wow, the list goes on and on...  :-)

Edit - I've found some great math resources, both online and off, through NCTM (National Council of Math Teachers) and various agencies or businesses, like NASA (Mission Mathematics) and SeaWorld (A Splash of Math).  I don't use these for a full math curriculum, but they are perfect for building math into a unit study.  I'm using the SeaWorld resource right now with an oceanography study, and it's incredible - geometry, statistics, real-life application, scale models, etc.  I didn't get to apply math this way until my sr. year in high school!

Answer 8

A lot of what is available from other sources is also sold on-line, so I am not sure they count.  Even Barnes and Noble and my public library have a website.

But I agree there are an overwhelming amount  of resources available.  Its great!