Affordable Homeschooling with Notebooking

Welcome to the Super Simple Homeschool podcast where we help you find purpose in your homeschool while keeping it super simple.

I’m your host Jenny Hedrick, and today we are going to talk about some simple things you can do to keep your homeschool affordable.

An Alternative to Traditional Curriculum

We live in an age of information. We can learn about anything we want in a matter of minutes. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

Think about the last time you learned something new. Perhaps it was how to bake sourdough, how to crochet, how to start a podcast, or something else. (I guess you know what I’ve been learning!) How did you learn it? I’m guessing that you didn’t spend money on curriculum.

Yet, when we think about homeschooling our kids, the task seems so great and so overwhelming! We scour the internet and facebook groups in our quest to find the perfect curriculum. For more on that topic, listen to Episode 1: The Search for the Perfect Curriculum.

But can we find everything we need to teach our kids what they need to know without depending on expensive curricula?

Each state has different regulations around homeschooling, but most do require that you teach a set of standard school subjects like math, reading and writing, history, science, and civics. To find out what is required in your state, visit the HSLDA website.

Once you know what is required, you can start to think about HOW you want to teach these subjects.

Skill-Based Subjects

First, let’s talk about your skill-based subjects. These are language arts (reading, writing, spelling, grammar, etc.) and math. These are the subjects you are most likely to want or need some type of curriculum. But before you spend any money on curriculum, head to your local library.

Libraries have many resources for teaching your child to read, from easy readers to instructional books for parents. For example, you can check out books on reading like Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons or The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading. If you don’t know where to start- ask your librarian to point you to what they have available.

But the library isn’t your only resource. Did you know there is a dyslexia specialist who has a whole series of videos teaching kids to read for FREE on YouTube?

If you do suspect dyslexia or are having other reading challenges, you will likely need a program designed for these special challenges. But again, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to teach your child to read. When I realized that my oldest was dyslexic, that’s exactly what I did. I felt lost and scared that I was going to mess up my kids, and I ran to the Facebook groups and blogs searching for curriculum to help me.

I then went to a popular dyslexia reading program website, spent a few hundred dollars and waited for my big box of materials to arrive. We spent the next year struggling to get through that curriculum only to decide it wasn’t going to work for us.

Oh, how I wish I had learned my lesson at that point. But no, I went out and spent another few hundred dollars on a different curriculum that, you guessed it, also was not a good fit.

Guys, I had the most success and am STILL using a FREE program that I found online along with a book I got for $16 on Amazon. I didn’t need to spend all kinds of money on a program just because so many people recommended it.

Those programs are great and work well for some people. I just wish I would have known that there were lower-cost options out there.

For math, ask your librarian what kind of resources they have. Some libraries have homeschool math curriculums like Math-U-See that you can borrow!

If that doesn’t work, you can get grade-level math workbooks at Walmart or Amazon and look up instructional videos on YouTube as needed.

The point is, don’t think that just because you are homeschooling means that you need to buy all the curriculum.

Now, I know we didn’t cover all of the language arts and math options, but I just wanted to give a few ideas to get you started. There are tons of low-cost resources for both subjects out there if you are willing to do a little bit of digging.

Content Subjects

Now, let’s talk about the content-based subjects like history and science. Content subjects are very easy to teach using the library and the internet. Take History, for example…

We love the Story of the World books by Susan Wise Bauer- you can get these books at the library. We use the audiobook from Audible. But instead of purchasing and using the corresponding worksheets and activities, we use a homeschooling tool called Notebooking.

Notebooking is the one thing we use in our homeschool that helps us keep things super simple. Instead of buying curriculum sets that include a textbook, workbook, and activities, we keep a notebook to help us apply and remember what we learned.

Notebooking

Think of notebooking more like scrapbooking. This can be done with pens, markers, drawings, and stickers. It can also be completely digital using graphics, online images, or your own photos. It is fully customizable and works with kids of all ages! Notebooking replaces worksheets and workbooks with narrations, summaries, and highlights. Students create notebook pages with visual cues and written reminders of the content they have learned.

The steps of notebooking are as follows:

1. Read, listen to, or watch something. This is the content of your learning. You can use picture books, audiobooks, textbooks, podcasts, or videos.

2. As a group, summarize or narrate what you learned.

3. Individually, come up with an image in your head to help you remember what was learned. Then either draw that image in the notebook or find and print a picture.

4. Individually, write a summary of what was learned.

5. Finally, share the notebook pages with a friend or family member. We like to to share our pages with dad to show him what we’ve been learning.

That’s it! Here’s how it looks for us. When doing history, we listen to our chapter in Story of the World. Then we talk about it all together. Next, each child completes a notebook page of what they want to remember from the chapter. They each do this at their own ability level. They draw a picture or find one to print out that relates to what we learned. My youngest, age 6, dictates to me her summary of what she learned. My older boys use talk-to-text on their tablets to write a few sentences. We edit the sentences for grammar and then they print them out and paste them into their notebook.

We do the same thing for science, economics, geography, and any other content-based learning that we might do.

Now, they don’t do too many pages in a day. We typically loop through our content subjects daily in addition to our skills-based subjects. Looping is another tool that helps us simplify our homeschool. You don’t need to cover all the subjects every day. Looping simply means rotating through a set of subjects so that you don’t miss any, but also aren’t trying to fit them all into your day.

The great thing about this method of learning is that it frees you to find whatever content works for your family- no curriculum necessary! For science, we’ve used audiobooks, podcasts and videos on YouTube. For History, we’ve not only used Story of the World, but also historical documentaries and picture-book biographies. For our U.S. geography, we use YouTube vidoes on the different states, recording information in our notebooks.

Not only is notebooking an effective teaching tool, it is also a great way to save money in your homeschool. All you need is a binder or a homeschool notebook, some paper, writing utensils, the internet and a library card. As an added bonus, you have a beautiful portfolio of your child’s learning at the end of the year. No more trying to decide what to do with completed workbooks and worksheets. I have a complete guide to Notebooking where you can see examples of notebooking pages my kids have done.

Finding Educational Content

One question that often comes up here is how to find good resources for your content. Here are some of the things you can do:

1. Explore book lists on curriculum websites. I often go to the websites of different curriculum providers and explore their booklists. These are the books I look for at the library.

2. Ask around. Do your friends have books or resources that they love? Ask in a Facebook group for homeschoolers.

3. Don’t be afraid to look on YouTube. Our U.S. geography study uses the Homeschool Pop U.S. States Video Playlist on YouTube. We love it!

Other Tips for Affordable Homeschooling

Hopefully, by now you feel a little more confident to find some of your own resources instead of relying on an expensive curriculum. But if you don’t, OR you prefer to use a curriculum that lays it all out for you, there are still plenty of ways to keep your homeschool affordable.

If you do want to try a certain curriculum, here are some tips to help you stay within your homeschooling budget.

1. See if anyone you know if using that curriculum and is willing to let you look through it first

2. Call or email the curriculum company to see if they have samples that you can try before you invest in the curriculum

3. Check Facebook Marketplace for used curriculum

There is also a fair amount of free homeschool curriculum online for those who are willing to do a little bit of searching. The Freedom Homeschooling blog has extensive lists of free curricula, broken down by subject.

Homeschooling doesn’t need to be overly complicated or expensive. By using the library, the internet and tools like notebooking and looping, we are able to keep our homeschool affordable, purposeful and super simple.

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