There has never been a better time to home educate; never before have we had access to SO much information – literally at our fingertips! A great education starts with access to vast knowledge and harnessing online resources gives access to all types of knowledge for all possible home-ed subjects.

Teaching Resource Sites for Home Educators

Home education gives you the option to use an all-in-one, ready-made curriculum, or to create a unique curriculum for each home-learner. If you’re curating a curriculum for homeschoolers, sites that guide you through the subject topics that schools cover are a great resource for home educators – both to gather classroom materials and to plan a homeschool syllabus that covers everything home learners need to know.

If you’re home educating according to the UK curriculum, BBC Bitesize and Twinkle are great resources to help home educators plan curriculum and timetable lessons for homeschool.

Twinkle for Home-Ed

Twinkle arranges resources according to National Curriculum aims for each year group and offers teaching plans in the form of units of work for each subject: As a home educator you can easily see what you should be covering at what stage of a child’s education and find the resources to help you teach those lessons at home. A subscription to Twinkle gives home educators access to lesson plans, worksheets, testing materials and schemes of work for all year groups age 3-18.

The home learning hub on Twinkle provides downloadable unit studies to match curriculum subjects and topics, lesson resources to use in a home-ed classroom and resources specifically created to help home educators plan and organise a homeschool efficiently and effectively. The Home Education Plan Templates are really useful and the Daily Learning Inspiration section is full of fun, engaging lesson ideas that normalise home education as a schooling choice. Twinkle resources can be saved directly to Google Drive, making it easy to stay organised.

BBC Bitesize

BBC Bitesize again follows the topics covered by the UK National Curriculum. It is a less in-depth resource than Twinkle, however it has the advantage of being a resource home learners can use to study independently at their own pace and is a completely free resource. Home educators can assign subjects and lessons to a student’s personal Bitesize account. Bitesize lessons are useful as introductions to topics and overviews of subjects. The ‘Learn and Revise’ sections of the website are useful tools to identify any learning gaps.

TES

An alternative to Twinkle is TES. As well as a wealth of individual topic lessons – over 900,000 teacher-made learning resources – the site offers subject resource bundles. The resource bundles makes TES a great digital resource option for home educators who like to plan for a term (or a school year) at a time, as well as home educators who plan weekly. The resources are comprehensive and both easy to teach and to learn from.

Digital learning resources from Twinkle, TES and BBC Bitesize are useful to use as homeschool grab-and-go lessons.

The digital resource sites below are a mixture of sites that can be used as core curricula for home-ed subjects, websites that are useful for lesson materials and learning resources and other sites that are great supplementary resources for a home-ed curriculum.

STEAM subjects

English

History & Geography

Music and Hobbies

Languages

Coding

There are thousands of teachers online sharing resources they create to use in their classrooms: Use their experience! A good place to start is Pinterest to find (general and specific) home-ed inspiration. If you know what lessons (subjects/formats) you’d like to include, finding resources for the classroom is easier.

Downloadable Worksheets for Home-Ed

Use worksheets in home-ed classes as a lesson resource, to supplement an online course or to use as extension/filler lessons. Worksheets are good short-burst handwriting/spelling practice and a great way to recap knowledge.

There are lots of ways to easily and relatively quickly make worksheets that line up perfectly with homeschool lessons. For digital worksheets (to assign for learners to complete online), Interacty is easy to use (and free to try).

Teachers Pay Teachers (free/paid)

Ready-to-use worksheets that can be downloaded to print or integrated with Google Classroom if you use online classrooms in your homeschool.

Education.com (free/paid options)

I like this site for short reading/writing comprehension exercises. The site also has a range of learning games, online exercises to assign and a section of ready-made lesson plans to print and use.

Ed Place (free/paid membership options)

EdPlace is fantastic for UK based home educators because the site has a range of resources developed for pupils taking the 11+ exam. The 11+ curriculum can be used by home educators as an extra curriculum taught to boost home learners skills in verbal and non-verbal reasoning skills.

The British Science Week website has some fantastic activity packs to use in home-ed science.

What’s great is how the worksheets highlight the skills students will practice in the lessons. Education is largely about developing a skill set. The skills highlighted in these activity packs are all skills that are useful for home learners to develop (self-motivated, organised); and skill sets that will benefit learners outside of academics (collaborative, logical, curious, hard-working).

Digital Tools for a Home-ed Classroom

Internet access and a device to type on.

A smart phone can be used for researching, accessing audiobooks/podcasts, and even used as an e-reader for ebooks but to use digital resources as lessons, a device with a keyboard is a necessity and even if a lot of the homeschool classroom work is completed offline, a comprehensive computing education is important.

A writing programme for the device: Word/Google Docs etc.

Typing up school work helps reduce paperwork (digital paperwork work is easier to file), typing can make the process of actually writing easier for some learners, and learners today, whether educated in school or at home, need to be both computer and keyboard literate.

A resource to allow homeschoolers to express themselves creatively

when completing project based school work. Canva is so simple to use even younger homeschoolers can teach themselves how to use it, and does everything learners need to create school projects.

That’s it. That is really all you need to home educate:

A computer programme/app that lets homeschoolers write work (that you can mark and file), and an app or programme that lets homeschoolers express themselves visually as well as in writing.

After school

A wind-down activity between the end of the home-ed day and the start of free time is a simple way to switch from ‘school’ into home mode again.

Independent reading, reading together & colouring together are good activities for this, getting outside is always a good option and another is to watch something together. It could be a TV show, a documentary (1/2 an hour at a time, split over a couple of days) or (part of) a film. Ted Talks work really well to close that school-home gap. (Use the topic of the talk as a passive introduction to the next day’s ‘school’.)

‘Hanging out together online’ is another easy, no-prep activity to wind down with. Visit a museum, play with AI, create a party poster using Canva or simply scroll.

Finding new websites together and playing around on those sites is a good way to encourage homeschoolers to be selective about how and where they spend their free time online. Choosing sites together allows us to enforce the (unspoken) rule that time online should (mostly) be spent productively or being inspired.

Sharkle is a ‘Generator of Random Awesomeness’  and we’ve discovered so many cool sites through it.  Click ‘SHOW ME SOMETHING AWESOME’ and it directs you to websites you might never have found otherwise. It’s really fun and for homeschoolers, especially learners studying coding, or interested in art and graphics, the websites it generates links to are sites that inspire students to take on their own projects

(N.B.We’ve used Sharkle for years and have never been shown an inappropriate site but it’s a good idea to refresh internet safety rules before letting homeschoolers use sites that generate random content of any kind.)

  • Table Topy: a wonderland of background sounds to download and use in video projects etc.
  • Synthesia by Rikard Lindstom is an ingenious site that transforms a computer keyboard into a music keyboard and makes art from the music you play!

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