How to Compare Homeschool Curriculum Options Before You Buy

The homeschool budget is not decided when you buy. It is decided a few weeks earlier, at a desk, with three browser tabs open and a shortlist for one subject.

And almost everyone makes that decision on two numbers — the price and the star rating — which are, between them, the two weakest predictors of what the choice will actually cost you.

Here is the comparison that gets made instead, worked through on a real math shortlist. It takes about twenty minutes per subject and it governs the largest line in the year.

The Shortlist

One family’s three options for a Grade 5 math curriculum. These are the fields worth recording — the ones you can find in ten minutes and will want in front of you again next year.

Read that table the usual way and Option B wins comfortably: $83 cheaper than A, no prep, a rating within a point of the best. Option A was chosen. Here is the arithmetic that explains why — and note that prices and product details change, so treat these as one family’s entries at one point in time and check current figures for your own shortlist.

Number 1: Cost Per Completed Lesson

Divide the price by the lessons you will actually get through. A four-lesson week over 36 weeks is 144 lessons.

This number is most useful as a sanity check rather than a decider. Its real job is catching the expensive purchase that gets used eight times — a $90 supplement covering a six-week unit is $15 a lesson, and seeing that written down has stopped more bad purchases than any budget line.

Number 2: Cost Per Child After Reuse

This is where the ranking moves, and it depends on facts about your family that no review can supply.

The question to answer per option: if a younger child reaches this level in two years, what do I pay then? Three cases, and you need to check which one applies to the specific product rather than assuming:

• Nothing — a non-consumable book you keep.
• A part-price refill — the consumable workbook is rebought, the reusable component is not.
• Full price again — a per-student online licence, or a fully consumable workbook.

In the worked family, the Grade 2 child was already using the same publisher as the Grade 5 child and the manipulative blocks carried across, so only the level-specific materials were bought again at $132. Had the same family gone with an online per-student licence for both children, that line would be $55.08 twice.

Option B is still cheaper. The point of doing the arithmetic is not that it always flips the answer — it is that you now know the gap is $159.84 across two children rather than the $82.92 the price tags suggested, and you can decide whether the difference buys something you want.

Number 3: Your Hours

This is the number that decided the worked shortlist, and it is the one nobody writes down.

Prep time per lesson × 4 lessons a week × 36 weeks:

Sixty hours. That is Option C — the middle option on price — asking for a working week and a half of parent preparation across the year, for one subject, for one child. If you are teaching two children across six subjects each, this is the number that determines whether the plan survives past Christmas.

Note what it does not tell you: Option B’s zero is zero prep, but it is also zero parent involvement, which for some children in some subjects is the reason to reject it. The hours number is not automatically an argument for the lowest one. It is an argument for choosing with the figure in front of you.

Number 4: The Fit Test

The three numbers above are arithmetic. This one is judgment, and it should be written as a sentence rather than a score, because a sentence is what you will need next May when you are deciding whether to continue.

Two questions worth answering in writing per option:

• Does the teaching style match this child? Mastery (finish a concept before moving on) versus spiral (revisit concepts across the year) is the split that most often explains why a well-reviewed curriculum did not work in a particular house.
• Does the grade range give you room? Option B spans Grades 3–7, which means a child who needs to sit at a level for a while, or move up early, does not need a new purchase.

Score them if you like — a 1-to-5 on fit alongside the numbers is enough — but keep the sentence.

Keep the Comparison

The single biggest waste in homeschool planning is throwing this away after buying.

Next year you will compare math options for the same child again, and the shortlist will be substantially the same. The option you rejected is the one you will reconsider first. A kept comparison, with a note on why you chose what you chose and a line at the end of the year on whether it worked, turns a multi-evening research project into a ten-minute review.

Keep it in the same file as the budget it drives and the hours log it will eventually fill, so that the decision, the cost and the outcome all live in one place. The full planner setup shows how those pieces connect — and the cost breakdown shows what a full year of these decisions adds up to.

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The Cost Comparison tab is this page as a working sheet: two or three options per subject, side by side, on curriculum name, publisher, price, format, grade level range, teaching style, prep time needed and your own 1-to-5 rating — repeated per subject, and kept, so next year’s decision starts where this year’s finished.

What makes it more than a chart is what sits next to it. Curriculum Shopping takes the option you chose straight into a 50-row purchase list with subject, publisher, format, cost, purchased flag and which child it is for, which the Dashboard sums into a five-category budget summary returning spent, remaining and percentage used. Year Review then sets budgeted against actual by category, so the comparison you made in June is answerable in May.

Around them: an Attendance Tracker of 200 day rows splitting hours by subject with a live days-and-hours count on the Dashboard, a Grade Tracker returning a percentage per assignment, a Weekly Schedule in half-hour blocks, Field Trips & Extras, a Resource Library with logins and ratings, and a State Requirements tab for your own state’s days, hours, subjects and assessment rules.

Eleven tabs, 541 formulas, and a worked sample family already loaded — including the three-option math comparison above — so you can see it running before you type anything. Works in Excel and Google Sheets. No macros, no add-ons.

Get the Homeschool Curriculum Planner & Budget →