Homeschooling on One Income

When my husband and I married almost 9 years ago, we agreed that I would stay home with the children. A couple of years after that I became a homeschooling stay at home mom as well. Since marriage, I have never worked outside of the home and I wanted to share some tips on how we homeschool within our means.

1. We borrow hundreds of books a year from the library. This is no exaggeration. Our library has a check out limit of 50 books for a lending period of 21 days. So every 3 weeks we check out the maximum number of books. Just this one resource alone is invaluable to us.

2. I use public domain books found on the internet. There are thousands of free books available for downloading or reading on Google Books and Archive.org. I printed off and bound primers and readers to give my children a strong foundation in reading once they learned phonics. They learned phonics from library books and Starfall.com (also free).

3. We use non-consumable textbooks. Once my oldest started middle school I felt that he needed textbooks to continue on his educational journey. But I have 3 more children that will eventually need those books as well. So, I applied a great approach that the public schools use. I pass down the books to the next year’s student and the children are not permitted to write in them at all.

4. I buy used books. Those non-consumable textbooks that I mentioned, whenever possible I try to buy a used copy in good condition from Amazon. At the beginning of the school year I was able to get a Pre-Calculus book and a Chemistry book for under $11 (total) for my 10th grader.

5. We use free video courses available online. You can find several at  Learner.org and M.I.T.’s open coursework site. Those books that I bought for my son, he uses those to go along with the Chemistry course on Learner.org. And, his Pre-Calculus class is taught by an M.I.T. professor - courtesy of the internet. For Spanish II, he’s using the 52 week video course Destinos. There are practice lessons to go along with the course on the site, so there was no need to purchase a textbook.

Aside from the $11 I mentioned above, the only cost for our homeschool this year has been for: basic school supplies, gas to go to the library, printer paper, and ink cartridges for our printer. It takes some planning and extra prep work, but it is possible to homeschool almost for free.

Serfronya Wallace

The six loves of Serfronya Wallace's life are God, her husband, and her 4 children - whom she homeschools. Serfronya enjoys sharing educational tips and writing about her family's homeschooling journey at Cookie's Domain.

Thank you for following The Homeschooling Blog!