Maths is the subject that comes up most often when home-educating parents talk about what they find hard. Whether you’re confident with numbers or not, at some point you’ll probably need to reach beyond yourself for support — a better explanation, a different approach, a resource that does the teaching so you don’t have to. This is the list we’ve built over the years: books, online programmes, tutoring options, and ways to make maths less of a battle on a difficult day.
Useful Maths Books for UK Home-Education
How to Be Good at Maths follows the order in which maths is taught in the UK primary school curriculum. It’s a visual guide making the textbook less overwhelming than many standard textbooks, and each mathematical concept is presented logically, broken down into manageable chunks. It is such an accessible textbook that our children refer to it independently outside of maths class.
Maths for Mums and Dads is great to refresh your own knowledge before (or at the same time) the homeschoolers cover the topics. It’s easy to understand, while being slightly more complex than the textbooks homeschoolers use. That said, for older home learners, this book makes a great reference book for them too!
What’s the Point of Maths? An excellent book to encourage reluctant maths learners. If we understand why we’re learning something, we’re more open to learning even the trickiest of things. ‘What’s the Point of Maths?’ shows learners how maths is an integral part of daily life and just how much fun it can be.
This is Not a Maths Book encourages readers to have fun with maths and is a great alternate maths lesson to include on a home-ed timetable; alternating lessons between ‘core curriculum’ and fun. Use the activities in the book after the lesson teaching the corresponding topic.
The Magic Way to Learn Your Times Tables – this audiobook is brilliant for passively teaching times tables (and yes, audiobooks totally do count as books!)
Online Maths Resources for Homeschool – KS1/2
N.B. These resources are an all-in-one, syllabus-guided resources for teaching primary school maths at home. Combined with worksheets to practice offline what they’re learning online, some fun number games and integrating maths into daily life, these resources provide a complete primary school (age 4-11) maths curriculum.
Maths Factor
Maths Factor, which we used for years and recommended without hesitation, has unfortunately been retired by Pearson. The options below are what we’d point you to now.
KooBits Math
Mathletics is fun. It challenges learners to complete maths challenges, set themselves maths learning goals and rewards them with certificates. There is a clear curriculum structure that is engaging yet simple enough for young learners to actually learn from.
KooBits Math, an online programme that aligns with the Singapore maths curriculum – one of the best in the world – would be an excellent alternative primary maths curriculum. It’s designed to be used with minimal supervision making it perfect for student-driven home education.
Online Maths Resources for Homeschool – KS3/4
For free resources to use in a home-ed maths classroom, Third Space Learning is excellent. The ‘Fluent in 5’ packs are brilliant to use in weekly folders for students to use independently.
N.B. At high school level, a textbook + AI acting as a tutor (Claude/ChatGPT) is a valid option. The resources below are video-based curriculums that allow the home learner to work at their own pace through the course, tracking their progress as they go.
IXL
IXL breaks learning down into grade levels (ostensibly following American curriculum targets but applicable for the UK homeschooler) and students unlock levels as they demonstrate mastery of maths skills.
IXL is useful for home-ed parents because of the website’s Diagnostic proficiency tests which allows you to create personalised learning plans for each student based on the analytics of their maths knowledge.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is an excellent home education resource across subjects. As a parent-teacher, I particularly appreciate the Get Ready courses for maths which we assign bi-monthly (or thereabouts) to check their learning progress.
Khan Academy has a more textbook feel to the website, making it a little more daunting for homeschoolers to tackle alone without prior subject knowledge, but if your home-educated child is a logical, tick-box style learner, this might be a positive.
Fishtank Learning
A fully comprehensive maths curriculum that home-educating parents can use with no prep.
For homeschooled pupils who prefer teacher-led lessons as opposed to video/app learning, this website is the maths resource I’d choose. It provides complete lesson plans with materials to use in each lesson, guides the teacher through lesson objectives/criteria, and offers extra resources to set as ‘homework’/extra study.
Preply – Online Maths Tutoring
Maths tutoring is a great idea to give home learners a confidence boost pre-exams or to help fill learning gaps. Tutoring can often be cost-prohibitive to use as a curriculum resource. Preply is a tutoring platform that makes tutoring an affordable option to include as standard as part of a homeschool maths education.
Extra Maths Practise
National Numeracy is a fantastic resource for homeschooling parents. Lots of activities to assign for home learners and tips on how to explain maths concepts. (It’s also a great site with resources to help you brush up your own maths skills before helping your children with theirs.)
Mathseeds is a brilliant maths programme for 3-9 year olds. It’s fun and effective and well worth including as part of a screen-time allocation for younger learners.
Explore the mathematical simulations on the PhET website. An incredible resource for science and maths, the simulations make learning maths concepts fun and many simulations are accompanied by a ready-made maths lesson. It’s a great home-ed resource.
Practical Application of Maths in Daily Life
Shopping, baking, DIY, painting all offer the chance to apply maths skills in practical ways – angles, geometry, algebra, percentages, division, estimates…once you start including maths in everyday conversations, the easier it becomes to make it a habit. If you need inspiration, Maxzone Academy has an entire section dedicated to ways in which you can apply maths to real life.
The book ‘Maths on the Go’ has some fun ideas of how to make maths more playful that are fun for primary school ages – ideas like working out your age in dog, cat and hamster years and ‘Guess my Shape’ – a mathematical mash-up of Twenty Questions and I-Spy’.
Make maths fun
- Lego is a fun maths manipulative to use to turn lessons into games
- Monopoly can be played by adding additional maths rules into the game – percentages/multiplication/division of property etc
- Sudoku is a winner for logical maths. Color-coded sudoku works well as an introduction to the game for younger learners. (Sudoku and similar logic/maths puzzles are activities we encourage our homelearners to enjoy offline. It’s always hard trying to balance screen time with home-learning so this is a simple way to tip the balance towards less screen time.)
- Puzzle books
- Watch Countdown! Kids love competitions and racing against the clock to test their maths skills is a great way to keep them engaged with the ‘WHY?’ of learning maths.
- Prodigy Maths is a game-based learning platform that aligns with the curriculum to solidify over 1500 maths skills! It’s a home-ed subscription that is worth the money if your learners are reluctant to practice maths.
Bonus Ways to Include Maths in a Homeschool Day
- Draw using maths principles! This is a great book to facilitate combined art and math lessons.
- Chess and backgammon are excellent board games to include in home-ed. Both teach strategy and logic, skills any maths learner needs.
- Including maths in project-based school work can add extra maths lessons into a homeschool timetable.
Math Geek Mama is an excellent site for home educators. The ‘Classroom Strategies’ page in particular has great ideas to make teaching maths more fun with lots of downloadable resources.
Affiliate disclosure
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy something through one of them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Where books are linked, I use Bookshop.org rather than Amazon because a percentage of every sale goes to independent bookshops. I only link to things I’ve actually used or would genuinely recommend. The commission doesn’t change what makes the list.
