Education Freebies

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By Beverly S. Krueger

It's been said that you can homeschool for free or practically free. For a thorough look, read Homeschool Your Child for Free by Laura Maery Gold and Joan M. Zielinski. The title of their book offered me a challenge to see what I could find that was free on the Internet to use in our homeschooling.

Finding free curriculum is fairly easy online. You can go to our Eclectic Weblinks Index to find educational sites that cover nearly every topic. You can also find multitudes of lesson plans. Below you'll find a list of some of the bigger lesson plan sites online.

My first stop on my freebie search was Google.com. Using the search terms education and freebie, I was not disappointed. I've included a list of such sites below because new freebies are always being offered. Let these sites help you track what is available.

Here are the deals I discovered:

	Leafy Greens Lesson Plans & Free Materials Teach your children about the nutritional benefits of eating leafy green vegetables. Lesson plans are online and free book covers, trading cards, brochures and posters are available on request.
	Curriculum Kits from the National Postal Museum Three kits are available (1) Pen Friends Across the Nation: An Intergenerational Letter Writing Project for grades 6-9, (2) We Were There: Letters From the Battle Front Curriculum Kit for grades 7-12, (3) Letters from Home: An Exhibit-Building Project for the Advanced ESL Classroom for grades 8-Adult.
	History Channel Classroom Get a free Idea Book for Educators. Tape the daily one hour History Channel Classroom programming. These programs are copyright cleared airing Monday through Friday from 6-7 am ET & PT/5-6 am CT. Many programs have online study guides.
	Nasa Regional Educator Resource Centers Free materials of all kinds dealing with earth science topics. Locations of Educator Resource Center by state. Visit Spacelink for a complete listing of all NASA instructional materials.
	Minwax Easy Weekend Projects Booklet Four wood working projects that take one to two weekends to complete.
	Economics Curriculum Material Videos and other materials from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
	Free CD-Rom software. You pay $4.95 shipping and handling for each title you order. Yes, these are all older and don't sell for much now. But they do include some useful titles. Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, Carmen SanDiego titles, Reader Rabbit's Preschool, Kindergarten, and 1st Grade, Compton's 3-D World Atlas, and others.

Educational Freebie Sites

	Cool Freebie Links
	Free Stuff for Education

Lesson Plan Sites

	The Lesson Plans Page
	Social Studies Lesson Plans and Resources
	Core Knowledge Lesson Plans
	AskERIC Lesson Plans
	New York Times Learning Network
	Encarta Lesson Plans
	Columbia Education Center Lesson Plans

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