And the Lord said, “Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his master will make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of food in due season?”
—Luke 12:42 (NKJV)
When presenting the idea of homeschooling to my husband about fifteen years ago, it was hard to imagine how he would react. I had given up my job to be a stay-at-home mom until the children entered kindergarten. Homeschooling would add another twelve years to our one-income lifestyle. But if I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have worried. Experience has proven that you don’t need to spend a lot of money for a quality education. If you’re feeling the financial pinch, consider these options to avoid going broke and to keep your children excited about their homeschooling adventure.
Find Discards
Watch for school or public library discards that can give you a great core curriculum but still allow freedom to use what your budget allows to supplement. One principal let us sort through oodles of learning games, activities, flash cards, and so forth with the invitation to take whatever we wanted before everything was hauled off to the landfill.
Buy Used
You can flip through the glossy curriculum catalogs to form your wish list, but instead of spending top dollar for new books, look for your choice items “gently used” online at discount prices. CheapestTextbooks.com offers price comparisons. Bookrenter.com offers five rental periods from thirty days to an entire semester and the option to extend or buy at any time. With 84 million active users, eBay usually has what I’m looking for. If not, I can post a request in the “Want It Now” section and receive email notification when someone lists the item(s) I’m seeking.
Be Careful
Keep your books in good condition so you can sell them later, giving you a head start toward next year’s book budget. My mantra whenever I saw a textbook handled a little too roughly was two words: resale value.
An easy-to-use site is www.cash4books.net. Type in the ISBNs of books you are selling to receive a free price quote. There are no hidden fees. They offer free shipping by providing prepaid labels and fast payment within three days of processing your books.
Barter
When my daughter reached tenth grade trigonometry, we hit a wall. If I didn’t want to spend eight hours a day figuring out matrix algebra so I could teach her (and I didn’t), we had to call a professional. Regular tutoring sessions were beyond our financial capabilities. I thought about what I had to offer and called a friend who taught math part time at a local private school. I offered to clean her house weekly in trade for tutoring sessions. She loved to “play at math” with my daughter, and I would much rather battle dust bunnies and bathtub rings than the zero factor theorem. It was a blessing and a win/win situation for us.
Be Creative
Make it homemade. Ever think, as you looked through the curriculum catalogs, “If only I had those manipulatives, flash cards, games, or other resources”? Using homeschooling catalogs as my guide, I often made my own version of learning tools I couldn’t afford. The only thing more rewarding than watching your children get excited about learning is saving money doing it!
Get Moving
Take ideas and turn them into activities. Create dances. Sing songs. Draw pictures. Make a catchy tune to teach times tables, a dance routine to learn the state capitals, or a poster to diagram parts of speech. That carries no overhead charges, but the fun, memory ability, and effectiveness of such activities are priceless! Who says you need to spend money on flash cards and expensive lesson supplements?
Learn from the Pros
Check the scope and sequence for several prepackaged (expensive) curricula available. Use them as your guide. Then go to your local library or request books from other area libraries to cover the same material without buying the texts. Also, use your computer. When I Googled phonics lessons, I got more than 700,000 results. Within the first ten, I found ready-made lesson plans and helpful online activities.
Crunching the numbers doesn’t have to mean sacrificing quality. We accomplished our first nine years without any real budget at all. We scrimped for a special workbook here, a prized favorite reader there. Those years that we had the least amount of money to spend on school supplies were the ones the children remember best. But if you must crunch numbers, try these: both daughters are currently in college maintaining 3.95 and 4.0 GPAs. How are those for numbers?
by Ruth Schiffmann
Originally published in Homeschooling Today magazine January/February 2011