Hosted by Biblical Womanhood
Up till now, I have made up our curriculum from all sorts of places. It hasn’t always been free, especially not when we first started and there weren’t wonderful places like Ambleside that offered free curriculum. But I never really paid a lot for it. I made many things myself. In the early years, instead of copywork pages that I printed out, I just wrote words and sentences in notebooks and the children copied them (and this was before I even heard of Charlotte Mason!!!).
We’ve always used real life situations for learning. Writing came from the experiences that the children had. Maths was basic stuff. It also came from real life - cooking, baking, measuring things…. I often used free worksheet generators for drills, or made my own simple flashcards.
Enter High School. I have all of Cindy Rushton’s books. I have read them. But, that type of homeschooling just wasn’t working anymore with our eldest son. He didn’t like notebooking or lapbooking. It was more of a struggle and chore than an enjoyable learning experience. An occasional notebooking page or lapbook was fine, but to have that as the whole curriculum wasn’t working. (NB I still love Cindy’s books! That kind of learning works fine for me and also for my daughter - is it a girl thing I wonder?!)
So, we chose to try ACE. As usual, we made the decision, and just did it. We usually do this kind of thing. There was money in the bank, so…… Hmmmm. Last weekend we did our budget (we’d been putting it off for months!), and saw that it just doesn’t add up!!!! Several categories had gone up, like school since we were now going for an official curriculum. Gas has gone up and I was spending more in that category. We had a new categories for train tickets for dh, and piano lessons for the kids. Etc, etc, etc.
As we looked at it, it was just a lot of little things that add up to the budget not working…. and also some bigger items like the new ACE curriculum, piano lessons and train costs.
My initial reaction was to say - well, we just have to go back to how we were homeschooling, and piano lessons will have to go, and I’ll cut the grocery budget waaaay back…! Thankfully my dh put the brakes on and said to just wait a while before I make any rash decisions (LOL!), and over the past week I have felt peace from the Lord and knowledge that He will work it all out. We may have to give up some of the things above, but we may not. We will stick with ACE until the end of the year, and then reasses. DH’s new job has overtime, so that will help pay for the everyday things. However, there is no room for savings. But again, we need to trust the Lord for that.
While homeschooling is now going to start costing us real money, we have done it differently. I have hundreds of ebooks, many of them free from Currclick. The great thing about these is that I can print them out again for each child. If it turns out we really can’t afford ACE in the long term, I can go back to these. I’ve already mentioned Ambleside Online - a great Charlotte Mason style curriculum. There is also An Old Fashioned Education and Mater Amabilis which is a free Catholic Charlotte Mason approach. A new site that gives you a free ebook every day during the week is Homeschool Freebie. If you sign up, you get an extra special one each week too!
Now for the promised free ebooks! 
They are nothing fancy, just some notebooking pages for you to use. Last year I put together the Back to School Notebooking Pages, and I just completed some Olympics Notebooking Pages for my kiddies. They are free for you to download. Please feel free to pass the word around, I’d like to bless anyone I can with these.
You can use the Olympics Notebooking Pages with a lot of the information from the links I posted here.
Well, this is long enough. I’m impressed if you made it this far!!! The long and short of it is, there are plenty of freebies on the net to make Homeschooling possible on a tight budget…..
