Overview
Freedom Homeschooling is an awesome, free resource that has tons of suggestions for free curriculum options by subject. They separate the Christian and Secular (non-religious) options by placing a red “C” next to the Christian-based curriculum options so you can easily find what you’re looking for. They have suggestions for free all-in-one programs here. They also have suggestions for curriculum by grade-level for each subject, which you could use to easily build your own curriculum.
Because these suggestions are given with the intent of helping you build your own curriculum, they do not offer a schedule to follow. They do, however, try to give tips on how often per week, etc, for the suggestions they give for each grade level to help you make your own plan. The curriculum covers 1st-8th grade only.
Reading
Reading is taught through phonics. The free suggestion for Language Arts for grades 1-5 is The Good and The Beautiful’s language arts curriculum. Their LA curriculum includes phonics, reading, writing, spelling, literature, grammar, punctuation, art, and geography. The Good & The Beautiful focuses on teaching phonics through phonics flash cards to help your child become a better reader.
Through the phonics flash cards, your child is exposed to (and expected to memorize, bit by bit) all of the sounds that each letter and different letter combinations can make. You can find a video about their language arts program here. To learn more about how this approach to teaching reading works, you can find a video about their phonics flash cards here.
Some Christians are against The Good & The Beautiful and discount it as a Christian curriculum option, because it was a Christian Curriculum created by a woman with Morman beliefs. Her goal was to ensure purity in the curriculum’s reading content. This is a deal breaker for many Christians, so I want you to be aware of this. If this is an issue for you, you can find other choices on their website to replace this one in the Language Arts section of their page.
Many Christians use the curriculum and love it. They say they have never run into anything even remotely questionable as far as content is concerned. Others, however, believe that because it was created by a woman who is not Christian that it should not be supported. Many parents feel strong convictions about this; many others do not. If you have any convictions about this, you would need to look for other free options suggested on Freedom Homeschooling’s Language Arts pages here and here.
Subjects
Freedom Homeschooling offers suggestions for Language Arts, Geography, Art, Handwriting, Reading, Math, Bible, History, Science, Life Skills, Computer Skills, and PE/Recess.
While the focus of this curriculum is to offer as many free options as they can, they do give one curriculum suggestion per grade level which will require you to buy actual books and/or curriculum for that subject. If you do not want to have to buy curriculum for that subject, you can look at their page of free options by subject to easily find a no-cost alternative.
Homeschool Style
Most of the suggestions by grade level look to be suggestions for free curriculum options that incorporate a Charlotte Mason style of homeschooling. If you are searching by subject, instead of grade level, I’m sure there are a variety of homeschool styles mentioned as options.
It seems that the author favors a Charlotte Mason style of teaching, and has recommended those options when they are available. Because of the mixture of options, I believe this curriculum would technically be considered an Eclectic style of homeschooling that favors a Charlotte Mason approach to teaching.
Taking It Offline
Freedom Homeschooling offers a lot of options for downloadable workbooks, teaching guides, and textbooks. Taking it offline would be easy- all you would have to do is choose options that would include these downloads so you can print them off. After printing them, you could easily hole punch them and put them into 3-ring binders as your own makeshift workbooks and teacher guides. Another low-cost option would be to buy folders with the 3 binding clips inside them, or you could even look into those plastic clip binding options you can get online.
My Thoughts
Freedom Homeschooling is a great resource for those trying to homeschool on a budget. Giving people these options, all in one convenient place, helps people to have the freedom of picking, choosing, and customizing their homeschool curriculum. It gives people the freedom of choice while still allowing them to have the structure and security that following a curriculum provides.
The biggest struggle with using Freedom Homeschooling would be all of the choices, but I feel like this problem has already been tackled and solved by offering their own recommendations by grade level.
Getting Started
Getting started is relatively easy as far as choosing curriculum goes – the hardest part is getting your year plan together. Go to the Freedom Homeschooling curriculum website and choose which grade level you’d like to get started with. Look through their options for each subject and poke around to see if those options are the ones you’d like to use. Print off the workbooks and teacher guides (if applicable) and put them in binders for offline use. Make a note on your Homeschool Planner on the “General Year Plan” page by jotting down which websites and online activities you’re planning on using, if any.
Planning Your Lessons
The next step to getting started with Freedom Homeschooling is planning your lessons. Because they don’t give you a schedule for completing the lessons, you’ll have to do this part yourself. I know it can seem intimidating, but figuring out a general plan for the year is something you only have to do once each homeschool year.
See how many lessons are given for each subject and make a note somewhere of it. Don’t stress out about this part – just focus on one subject at a time. Pick a subject to start off with. Divide your total number of lessons by the total number of weeks you’ll be homeschooling. This will tell you how many lessons per week you need to complete in that subject.
Examples of Planning for a 36 Week School Year
For example, if my PE curriculum has 36 lessons, and I’m planning on doing school 5 days a week for 36 weeks, then I would need to do one lesson per week. I know this because 36 lessons divided by 36 total weeks= 1 lesson per week.
If there are 180 lessons in Language Arts and I’m planning on doing school for 36 weeks, I would need to do 5 lessons a week in that subject. If there are 140 lessons and I’m doing 36 weeks, I would get 3.8, so I would just round that up to 4 and make sure 4 lessons of that subject are completed each week.
Examples of Planning for a 45 Week School Year
If I’m homeschooling 4 days a week for 45 weeks of the year and my PE curriculum has 36 lessons, 36 lessons divided by 45 total weeks = 0.8. The calculator on my phone also gives the fraction equivalent of decimals, which in this case is 4/5. So I can choose to do this subject 4 out of every 5 weeks OR I can just round it up to 1 and choose to do 1 PE lesson per week until all of the lessons are completed. Doing it the second way, I could choose to not follow a curriculum for the remaining weeks and just have them do physical activities, like playing catch or playing outside, or I could choose to be done with PE for the year.
If Language Arts has 180 lessons and I’m doing a 45 week school year, I would need to make sure 4 lessons get completed each school week. If my Language Arts program has 140 lessons, I would get 3.1, so I would need to complete 3 lessons each school week.
Examples of Planning for a 52 Week School Year
If I have chosen to do 3 days per week for the entire 52 weeks of the year, I would divide 36 PE lessons by 52 weeks, which gives me 0.69. 0.69 is really close to 0.7, so if I round it up to that, the fraction form of 0.7 is 7/10 (you can do a quick google search for “0.7 as a fraction” if you don’t want to do the math yourself, or if you aren’t sure how). So I would need to do PE 7 out of every 10 weeks of the year from the curriculum lessons. I could also choose to make up my own curriculum for the other 3 weeks of the 10, or I could continue the curriculum until it’s complete and cut PE out of the workload for the rest of the year.
If Language Arts has 180 lessons per year, and I’m doing a 52-week school year, I’ll get 3.5, so I’ll need to plan to complete 3-4 lessons in language arts each week. If Language Arts has 140 lessons per year, and I’m doing a 52-week school year, I’ll get 2.7, so I’ll need to do 3 lessons each week to complete the curriculum by the end of the school year.
**Note: Doing 3 days per week for 52 weeks only gives you 156 school days. If your state requires more than 156 school days yearly, you’ll need to figure out which weeks you’ll be adding a day to your week for however many days you’re short. For example, in Indiana we are required to do 180 days per school year. So 180-156=24 days you’d be short. This means you’d need to plan on a 4-day school week for 24 of your school weeks to get all of your legally required days in. So that’s 24 school days you’d need to add into your plan somewhere. Some states only require 140 school days per year, so in those states you’d be fine with planning a 3 day school week without adjusting it.
Congratulations! You Did It!
After doing this for each subject, write down on your “General Year Plan” page of your homeschool planner (or just a regular piece of paper) what your plan for each subject is. Once you know how many lessons per week you’re doing in each subject, just look through your subjects and decide which subjects you’re going to do on which days of the week.
You could choose to do all of the lessons for the week of one subject in one day (block scheduling – i.e., all of the Language Arts lessons for the week on Mondays, all of the Math lessons on Tuesdays, all of the Electives on Fridays, etc), or you could choose to spread each subject out through the week. After making these final decisions, your whole year is pretty much planned out for you. You did it!!
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