Homeschool Supplies
It is very easy to convince yourself that you need a lot to start home educating. You don’t.
The core of it is this: books, writing materials, basic art supplies, and internet access. That’s the kit. Everything else is useful rather than necessary, and most of it can wait until you know what your particular home-ed day actually looks like.
Books
Reading is the foundation of everything else, and access to books matters more than which books or how many you own. Local libraries will order books you request. Second-hand bookshops are good for building up a shelf of classics without spending much. Digital libraries work well on any e-reader, and local library cards often extend to borrowing e-books. If you come across bundles online — age-graded, genre-mixed — they’re a good way to put a variety in front of your child and see what captures their imagination.
There’s also a case for a home library of reference books: a good atlas, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and encyclopedias. These tend to get used more than you’d expect when learning is happening at home rather than in a classroom, and encyclopedias are an easy catalyst for project-based, interest-led learning.
Writing materials
Lined paper for most written work, plain paper for notes and diagrams. Some children prefer keeping everything in a subject notebook; others work better with a single folder. We use notebooks per subject for ongoing work and loose, lined paper for everything else, filed after the lesson (in theory).
Worth noting: a change of writing implement can do a lot. Purple glitter pen is as valid as black biro in a home-ed classroom, and sometimes swapping one for the other is enough to bring a reluctant writer back. You set the rules.
A computer or tablet with a keyboard
Internet access is a home education essential in a way it genuinely wasn’t even ten years ago. The range of online resources, courses, tools and tutorials available now makes this an extraordinary time to be learning outside school. Learning to type properly matters too — it’s a skill that compounds quickly and pays off for years.
Basic art supplies
Watercolours, felt-tip pens, coloured pencils. Sellotape, washi tape, a glue stick, a tin of pencils (that will always need sharpening). A craft basket of recyclable materials that will be occasionally chaotic and often genuinely useful. Art is easy to fold into other subjects and having the supplies accessible means it actually happens.
Maths equipment
A decent calculator, a basic geometry set with a compass and protractor. For younger children, something to use as a maths manipulative — Cuisenaire rods if you want to buy them, Lego or dried pasta if you don’t. Concrete objects make abstract concepts land faster, whatever those objects happen to be.
That is genuinely it. To home educate, you need to buy not much more than you would for a child in school, and in some cases rather less — no uniform, no PE kit, no contribution to the class trip fund.
The rest of the list that usually follows a post like this — headphones, a printer, subscriptions, digital resources — is worth thinking about, but belong in a different conversation once you know what your home-ed week looks like.
Read next: A Home-Ed Budget — what it really costs
