NCHENZ should be your first port of call as soon as you get your exemption approved. With free (or koha) membership, wonderful liaisons and an array of heavily discounted learning programmes, what’s not to love?

HESSA – if your child is passionate about sports, look into homeschooling sporting opportunities here.

Literacy Resources I love and recommend:

Early and Primary aged Literacy (3-13)

• Reading Eggs – Fast Phonics (younger) & Reading Eggspress (older) 
• Teach Your Monster To Read
• Night Zookeeper
• The Good and The Beautiful Language Arts (free online pdfs for homeschoolers!)
• Twinkl.co.nz – search by skill or interest!
• Yeet! Card Game – NZ created phonics based card game
• Bananagrams & Scrabble / Scrabble Jnr
• All sorts of neat learning games and resources from Creative Classrooms

Later Primary/Intermediate/High School Ages (10-16+)

• Night Zookeeper
• Harbour & Sprout Topic Unit Studies – integrate literacy into interest based studies
• IXL English (interactive online learning covering all the essential spelling, grammar and literacy skills
• Brave Writer 

Amazing Maths Resources:

• Prodigy Maths (perfect if your child/teen likes battling and collecting magical creatures and items!)
• Mathseeds (attached to Reading Eggs)
• Khan Academy 
• The Good and The Beautiful Maths
• Maths is Fun – lots of walk throughs and printables to teach different maths skills
• IXL Maths – interactive online learning covering all the essential maths skills at your chosen year level – ties into the New Zealand Curriculum
• Physical resources such as a big bag of dice, basic set of cards, Numicon set, abacus, counters, beads or colourful items to count and group, fractions magnet sets (lots of these can be found at your local $2 shop, Kmart and at Creative Classrooms)

Card and Board Games for Maths learning:

• Uno
• Battleship 
• The Game of Life
• Sushi Go
• Settlers of Catan
• Monopoly
• Yahtzee
• Munchkin 
• 20 card games for learning maths 

Science, Technology, Social Sciences & The Arts

• Harbour & Sprout
• The Wildering Nook – nature based unit studies and booklets – offerings from a beautiful NZ based mama and nature educator
• The Good & The Beautiful Free Marine Biology
• Minecraft & Minecraft Education
• Science Learn NZ
• Twinkl.co.nz – search by subject, interest or topic
• Winda Tutors – awesome NZ based STEM (including Minecraft & coding) online classes with small groups 
• Ecosystem Card Game
• Creative Classrooms – check out their science & STEM gear!
• Scratch and Scratch Junior Coding online
• Code.org – try out the Minecraft Hour of Code challenges!

Neat unschooling families to follow

• Stark Raving Dad – unschooling kiwi Dad, blogs, podcast ‘Life Without School’
• Lucy Aitkin Read – DISCO – unschooling and matriarch entrepreneur – webinars, online courses & workshops and social media inspiration

Amazing experts and resources for Neurodivergent whanau – also look these up on your fav social media platform for ongoing inspiration!

• The Weave ND Community Facebook & Instagram, an inclusive, supportive and knowledge fueled community of ND unschoolers & homeschoolers in NZ and around the world, with a focus on wellbeing, community building and expert knowledge in supporting our ND tamariki and ourselves as parents/caregivers
• Dr Naomi Fisher – books, webinars & courses with a school trauma and autism / ND lens
• NeuroWild – resources and advocacy for our ND children
• Kristy Forbes – online webinars and courses with a lens of AuDHD & PDA
• At Peace Parents / Dr Casey Ehrlich – online courses & coaching with a PDA focus

And don’t forget to follow my own unschooling journey with my two children by following me on instagram @learningourown.way