Affordable Homeschooling

Affordable Homeshooling and keeping it CCS-FREE

One thing homeschoolers love are FREE resources. However, with CCS (Common Core Standards) free might not be the best thing.  I haven't talked much about CCS, or at least not here on my blog, but I am a strong Anti-CCS supporter.  I believe CCS is meant to "dumb down America". I believe the public school system is broken and that no child should be in the system.

I believe that homeschoolers should fight to keep homeschool curriculum CCS-FREE and do their best to use CCS-FREE resources.

Thankfully we have resources like The Homeschool Resource Roadmap to help guide us and inform us of the CCS status of nearly 2,800 curriculum and resources options. I should disclose at this time that I have no financial gain from Homeschool Resource Roadmap, but I am an admin of  Christian Homeschool Oasis (CHO) , the facebook group, that was born in conjunction with Homeschool Resource Roadmap.

I see homeschoolers, in general, recommend things like Starfall, Khan, Spelling City, and others. These things are recommended because they are free, but they, in my opinion, are not the best options because of their CCS connections.

There are other resources that are CCS-FREE and good for the pocket book too. It just requires maybe looking a little bit deeper on the net, being okay with not being an exact copy of the CCS connected resource and sometimes being a little bit more involved and a little bit more planning on your part.

On today's periscope I talked about some of these things and as promise here are the links I mentioned:

What is CCS?

See Truth In American Education for more information.
Also this Youtube Video by NoTo CommonCore is helpful in answering the question: What is CCS?

Is the Curriculum/Site/Resource I want connected to CCS?

As I mention above The Homeschool Resource Roadmap is a good resource to find out if the curriculum/resource you are looking at has CCS connections. It is a database that is being added to and updated regularly that list the CCS status of nearly 2,800 items. Out of the the nearly 2,800 items listed about 60% of it is CCS-FREE (known as Independent on the Roadmap).
The Roadmap list things based on 4 categories

• Independent

• Correlated

• Coincidentally Connected

• Explicitly Aligned

Check out the roadmap. Nearly the whole site is free to access. The subject area where it takes the same info from the Common Core pages but list the resources based on subjects does require a ONE time fee.  Currently that fee is $4.99.  The Homeschool Resource Roadmap owner is thinking of raising the subscription in the next few months, but if you buy now you don't have to worry about that. Your subscription is a one time fee so if you you buy now at the $4.99 price you don't have to worry about the price going up -- seeing you already have access. 

Why have a subscription to the subject area if I can access the common core page for free? Well the simple answer is the the common core page requires you to know the name of the product you are looking for.  With the subject area you don't need to know the name of the product you just have to know the subject you want.. If I'm looking for math options then I would look under the math section.

Okay so I have decided I want to keep my homeschool curriculum CCS-FREE now what? 

Now you use the Roadmap to find CCS-FREE materials, but I will give you some pointers to start with. 

Instead of Starfall maybe Mighty Book or Kiz Phonics or Sight and Sound Reading or Progressive Phonics. Instead of Spelling City/Vocab maybe Spelling Help Online or AAA Spell. Instead of Khan (math) maybe XtraMath or AAA Math or CIMT.

Missed my live periscope? "Katch" the replay on katch.me or watch the embedded video below.




Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something.