The top 5 Online Homeschool Curriculums for Grades 1-8?
With the recent pandemic, there’s been a refocus on virtual schooling and online resources for students.  This has been a boon for the homeschool parent.  Where in the past, it may have been a bit more difficult to find quality, online resources, suddenly all students and parents were searching for online resources.  In other words, suddenly all parents became homeschool parents, if only for a short time, while the traditional in-person education system caught up.  Because of all this new demand, there has been a huge increase in the availability of online homeschool resources and online homeschool curriculums.
With all of these new online resources, the search for a quality homeschool curriculum that aligns to your values and teaches all the required skills can be a bit overwhelming.
Let’s walk through a review of the online homeschool curriculum options out there and which might be best suited to a homeschool family’s needs.
Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/)
Founded by Salman Khan in 2008.  Although Khan Academy is free, their coverage of curriculum topics can be incomplete, especially as it relates to the Common Core State Standards®.  They do provide a mapping to the CCSS, but not every skill in the standards has a corresponding Khan Academy lesson.  It can be a bit difficult to follow if you’re a homeschool parent trying to ensure your child learns every skill for their grade level.  To be fair, the Khan Academy targets users in India and around the world and not just within the United States.  They provide a mix of learning and testing for the skills that they do cover.
IXL (https://www.ixl.com/)
IXL is one of the most popular tools for online learning, whether it’s for tutoring, virtual schooling or as an online homeschool resource.  The site is easy to use and seems to have decent coverage of the Common Core State Standards for each grade level.  Note that they only cover Math and Language Arts for grade 1 and Math, Language Arts, Science and Social Studies for grades 2 through 8.
Another thing to note with IXL is that they focus on testing the skills for each grade level (which they do very well) but have little focus on teaching the skills. Â Pricing is $19.95 USD per month for their core subjects package for the first child and $4 for every additional child.
IXL would be a great tool in combination with an online curriculum that focuses on teaching the Common Core State Standards (see our review on 2cool4school).
Aleks (https://www.aleks.com/)
Aleks is another popular online curriculum tool.  Aleks focuses on using adaptive AI to determine a student’s current level of knowledge and then instructs them based on that.  Although they appear to follow the CCSS, coverage seems to be limited to Math and Science.
There are various options for purchasing, which can be confusing, but for simplicity of comparison, their monthly subscription price for K-12 is $19.95 USD per month per student.
Abeka (https://www.abeka.com/ )
Abeka is a Christian homeschool curriculum solution that provides textbooks, video lessons and other teaching aids.  They reference a “spiral learning approach”, which starts with basics and moves to deeper knowledge at age-appropriate times, with a continual emphasis on review and reinforcement before moving to more complex learning.
Pricing is $825 USD, but they allow you to spread this out across 10 months ($90/month).
Although one of the higher priced options, they do advertise as a faith-based solution for learning.
2cool4school (https://2cool4school.org/)
2cool4school is a popular online homeschool curriculum resource that focuses on the teaching aspect of a child’s curriculum.  2cool4school follows the Common Core State Standards and includes all the skills needed at each grade level from 1-8 for Math, English, Science, Health and Social Studies.  They easily have the most comprehensive coverage when it comes to teaching the skills within each grade level (at least within the $10-$75/month price-point). They’re also unique in that they provide human-reviewed and approved links to engaging learning videos for every topic as well as a way to track your child’s progress through the curriculum.
As they don’t include a testing component for curriculum skills, 2cool4school would be a good compliment to a solution like IXL.  In fact, the 2cool4school curriculum appears to align very closely to the IXL testing curriculum.  Both are easy-to-follow online solutions that would pair very well together and provide almost full educational coverage.  Both are very reasonably priced.
Pricing is $9.99 USD per month, per grade and you can switch grades once per year. It’s an additional $5 per month for additional grades if you have more than one child.
In summary, there are many online homeschool resources available for the homeschool parent, but the 5 homeschool curriculum tools listed here are some of the higher quality and more comprehensive available.  If you’re a homeschool parent looking for a curriculum that you and your child can follow online, at a reasonable price, we’d recommend pairing 2cool4school and IXL.  For the price and ease of use, you can’t beat them.
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