Yay! You’ve decided to homeschool your kids. That was the biggest decision you could make as a parent. I guarantee there will be glorious moments. There will also be challenging times, and homeschooling may only be a temporary solution for your family. Either way, I bet you are looking for options that won’t break the bank.
When I first started homeschooling my kids, I looked at the options and had a heart attack. Prices are so high. When you add everything up, you are spending over $10K per year per kid, unless you find things that work for more than one child at a time.
After years of digging for deals, I discovered seven amazing options out there and have put them together in this post for you. They are top-quality options. I know there are free and low-cost homeschooling options out there in the private sector, but when a company offers something at a super deep discount, you get what you pay for, so I steer clear of those options. They are likely to require you to spend hours and hours adding to them, fixing incorrect answers and typos, and searching for supplements to build complete courses.
Here is my list of top-quality options for new homeschooling families in the Bay Area:
- K-12’s California Virtual Academy is a free homeschooling solution that thousands of families use each year. This was how I began homeschooling my kids. The quality of materials is solid, often better than local public schools, and you get a framework and support to help guide you. A teacher is involved who acts as a mentor to you and a reviewer of all that your child will learn.
- Ocean Grove is a Bay Area online charter school with a physical presence in Santa Cruz. They offer a totally customized education for every kid. You receive a budget for the semester, and you shop to find all that you need. Then the teacher purchases the materials for you and ships them to your door. Like K-12, the teacher is there to help you and also work with your kids at a local library or coffee shop, or in your home, if you are having troubles. The teachers also review your child’s work and assess their progress for you.
- iXL is a high-quality self-learning platform for all grades and for all subjects. If you have a kid who loves assessments and tech, you can let them run free in iXL and check their progress in the parent portal. Plus, you are supporting an amazing local company. iXL is for all kids, not only for homeschoolers, so you can use it if you need supplements for your child who will be homeschooled in the future.
- The Well Trained Mind Forum is a gem of a resource online where you can ask questions, get answers from other homeschooling parents, and participate in curriculum sales. You probably are wondering what families do after their child finishes a math textbook that costs over $100. The answer is they sell it into the used market. You can pick up used homeschooling materials on Amazon and even Thrift Books, but it will still cost you a fair amount, so why not eliminate the middleman and purchase from the homeschooling family who used it last?
- Mr. Mac and his story-telling science courses at Rockit Science. These are in person and kids do cool and deceptively dangerous (but aren’t, really) experiments and builds to help the fictitious characters in the story he tells escape scrapes and defeat the bad guys. All the while, kids are learning physics and chemistry and electronics without realizing it. Hard core science courses that are so fun, you might find yourself sitting in the parent corner just to watch, but your kids will enjoy it much more if you scoot and let them be.
- Homeschool day at the trampoline store. Sky High Sports in Santa Clara has a weekly dedicated homeschooling session once a week for a great price. DEFY Trampoline Park also offers a Homeschool Membership which allows you to take your kids any weekday. Physical education for Bay Area homeschoolers can be a challenge when you homeschool unless you sign your kid up for sports or classes at the rec center. Letting your kids run free for a few hours in a trampoline building filled with other homeschoolers does triple duty: PE time, socializing and making new friends, and time for mom or dad to hang out with like-minded parents and rest.
- LARPing with Fanwar is an activity filled with a mixture of homeschoolers and other kids, all under the direction of some amazing story crafters. They play three-hour long events in Palo Alto and Berkeley regularly. My children absolutely loved these events, especially the venue in Berkeley at a park on a hillside filled with hills and valleys, paths through tall trees and through scrub. The joy it brings your kid to spend three hours running around with foam-duct tape weapons, hollering and scheming and building compelling characters, is priceless.