Let’s be honest. Homeschooling can be quite a challenge.

Whether you are considering switching to homeschooling or looking for ways to change up your resources to help your kids learn better, keep reading. You are about to discover tools to make this process easier and much more enjoyable.

The decision to homeschool your kids comes with a unique set of commitments and limitations. As a parent-teacher, you may discover numerous benefits in taking responsibility for your children’s education and enjoy spending more time with them. At the same time, however, you may find it quite challenging to tend to your children’s educational and social needs while also rocking parenthood or career.

The good news is that the internet is full of educational resources and tools to help address all your homeschooling needs. While educational technologies for homeschooling have been around long before the pandemic, the demand for digital technologies has increased dramatically over the last couple of years. As a result, parents and teachers now have even a wider choice of digital and online tools for homeschooling.

But where do you start? How do you integrate these tools? How can you bring more structure to your kids’ learning and help them thrive? How can you assess and monitor their progress?

With the plethora of EdTech tools and information, it may seem challenging to find quick and easy answers to these questions. To make things less overwhelming, we have picked some of the most popular resources to consider using in your homeschooling journey.

Help your kids develop a reading habit.

Want your kids to become avid readers, enrich their vocabulary or improve their concentration? Consider integrating eBooks into your curriculum.

There are countless benefits in reading to your children or helping them develop a reading habit. Whether you are reading to your kids, engaging them in a book club, or creating reading assignments, Project Gutenberg eBooks can be your go-to online library. As a non–profit organization, the project provides free access to more than 60,000 titles. You do not need any special apps to read the books and can simply use your browser or download the files for kindle or other e-readers.

Bring in visuals and video lessons.

Kids learn better with visuals. And even better when there’s an element of play involved. No secrets here.

If you are trying to add more fun, visuals, and video to their learning, consider signing up for BrainPop.

BrainPop is an educational platform with video-based resources that makes learning fun through games, animated videos, and reflective assignments to foster curiosity and love for learning. The platform offers engaging content with over 1,100+ topics across K-8 subjects ranging from sciences to arts and engineering. Available for use in the app and the browser, BrainPop assists thousands of teachers and homeschooling parents. With BrainPop Homeschool, you can create lesson plans, monitor your child’s performance to create individualized lessons, and access hundreds of tips and resources for instruction and assessment.

Get free content created by experts.

Khan Academy is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide "a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”

Their content ranges from math, science, and computing to economics, history, art history, and more, including K-14 and test preparation (SAT, LSAT) content. As a parent-teacher, you can access free tools to track and assess performance and deliver individualized instruction.

Need educational content in a language other than English? No worries. Khan Academy content has been translated into multiple languages from Greek and Spanish to Norwegian and Vietnamese.

Liven things up with online classes.

While the idea of homeschooling is to educate your kids in the comfort of your home, it does not mean you cannot bring outside elements into their learning. Live online classes are an excellent way of helping kids improve their social and communicative skills.

If you want to recreate classroom experiences and help your kids socialize while learning with others, Outschool may be the tool for you. The platform offers live online classes suitable for children as young as three.

Create opportunities for socialization.

Socialization difficulties might be one of the disadvantages of homeschooling. This is where a tool such as Primer can come in.

Primer helps create a classroom-like atmosphere and foster social interactions between kids. By joining one or more Primer clubs, kids engage with each other through their love and passion for specific subjects. Primer allows your child to be in their first club for free and pay $10/month to join more. On Primer, children engage in team-based assignments, learn together, and make new friends.

Focus on sparking curiosity

If you’re looking for a free and fun resource to foster your children’s curiosity in creative ways, Wonderopolis may just be the tool for you. It is an award-winning interactive learning website that engages kids with one question every day. As a creative learning space, Wonderopolis allows kids to wonder, ask questions, and tap into real-world learning.

Created by the National Center for Families Learning, Wonderopolis provides resources for Grades K-12, is available for free to parents and teachers, and can become a fun, inspiring resource to incorporate into your lesson plans.

Make science fascinating yet easy.

How can you engage your high schoolers with science content in easy creative ways?

The Fascinating Education may be the answer. It is a science-focused knowledge platform designed to make science easy for high schoolers. By utilizing their background and knowledge in neuroscience regarding “how we learn, how we focus our attention, how we retrieve information, and how emotion and motivation affect learning” Dr. Margulies creates questions and road maps to guide the students’ learning by engaging the “right hemisphere” of the brain.

Conclusion 

Now that you have unlocked so many tools to add to your teacher’s arsenal, you can explore them further to make your lessons conducive to learning while saving yourself some time and engaging your kids in fun ways.

Which tools will you be using and how? We’d love to know!