Should I Print or Buy My Homeschool Curriculum?

Many homeschool curriculums, such as The Good and The Beautiful curriculum are offered in two formats the printed book or downloadable PDF files. You can choose whether to buy the book or print the pdf yourself.

Most parents will benefit from purchasing The Good and The Beautiful curriculum in book form. The books are of higher quality and the sets for younger children include the wooden teaching tools that the lessons use. The books are also very affordable for a homeschooling curriculum.

Printing does have a place though and it may be the right choice for you. Keep reading to see if buying or printing The Good and The Beautiful curriculum is right for your family.

Printing Pros

The Good and The Beautiful should be praised up and down for making their curriculum available as PDFs. They have high-quality lessons and most of them are FREE!

One of the biggest pros of printing the PDF version is the cost. The Language Arts levels 1-8 and the Math lessons are all free to download! The only cost to you is the price of printing the lessons out. You could potentially use an iPad to go through the PDF if you want to avoid printing and you already have the iPad.

The Science and Handwriting lessons all need to be purchased if you’d like to print them, but they are still very inexpensive. The handwriting courses are only $10 to purchase the PDF for each course. Unfortunately, the history courses are being discontinued, but they will likely release new courses in the future.

The PDF can also be printed as many times as you like. If you have multiple children or a copy ends up lost, you can always print out more copies.

Another Pro to printing the course is how easy it is to transport. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that you can do it from anywhere! You can travel in ways that families in public schools can’t. If you have the downloads you can only print out the portion you need for the days you will be gone. That way instead of carrying several books, you can just bring several sheets in a folder. This can make homeschooling on the road, at the beach, or at grandma’s house much more manageable.

Buying Pros

There are definite pros to purchasing the book versions of the courses. The books are beautifully colored and made with high-quality paper that will stand up better to young hands than regular printer paper. They are also fairly inexpensive even if they are more than the cost of printing the books. Most of the books range between $40 and $77. The Handwriting books are only $3 or $4 more than purchasing the PDFs.

Having beautiful colored books will help your kids stay more engaged with learning. A child will notice the difference between a colored book on nice paper and a sheet of printer paper. It’s just different to have the professionally made copy.

The sets that the books are sold in also come with other resources to help you teach. For example, Math years 1-3 come with wooden objects that are used in the lessons that you won’t have access to if you just print out the pdf.

Printing Cons

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to printing PDFs. The first drawback is that you have to print them yourself. The files that the courses come in can be anywhere from 50 to over 200 pages. If you have multiple courses you are printing or you wish to print courses for multiple children it can take a long time.

If you are using an inkjet printer you could end up using an entire cartridge when printing out courses. Using a laser printer would be less expensive.

You also need to take into account binding the pages together which is an added cost and possibly requires going to a shop. It can be easy to lose pages if they are not bound together. After all the work you put in and how much printing costs, it’s not always that much less than just buying the books.

Finally, while you could print these on high-quality paper in color it would be easier and faster to just buy them that way.

Your child may not engage as well with the printed copies. I know that as a kid I always found books to be more engaging than material printed out on paper.

Buying Cons

These costs of purchasing the books can add up. If you were to purchase the year one course for Language Arts, Writing, History, Math, and a Science course you would have to pay $220 per child. That really is affordable for homeschooling materials, but it’s quite a bit more than printing the courses (especially when language arts and math are free!). If you have multiple children the price adds up too.

The books are also more difficult to travel with. If you have the PDF of each of these courses you could take just the portions you need during your trip, saving a lot of space in your vehicle. If you’re trying to fly to your destination taking all of your books is almost out of the question.

Who Should Buy the Curriculum?

As we said at the beginning there are a lot of benefits to buying books and almost everyone would benefit from purchasing copies.

The books are especially good for those who just want everything to be shipped to their house ready to go and looking good. Homeschooling is hard enough as a parent, we don’t need to make it any harder.

Who Should Print the Curriculum?

There are two types of people that would benefit the most from printing the curriculum.

One of The Good and The Beautiful’s main missions is to make homeschooling affordable and offering their PDFs so inexpensively is one of the ways they’re doing that. If you’re on a budget or you have a large family purchasing the pdfs and printing them out can be a lifesaver. If you have 5 children you’d be spending over $1000 on these courses. If you’re a lower-income family printing out the courses could save you a few hundred dollars that you can put towards essential or field trips for your children.

Some people also do homeschooling so that they can travel with their families. If this is you The Good and The Beautiful is a fantastic choice. If you have the PDF you can choose to print your lessons as you go. If you have a 2-week trip to Spain planned you can just print out the lessons for those 2 weeks and keep them in a folder. This gives you more space in your luggage and saves so much weight.

Even if you also have the books downloading the PDF is a great idea.

Conclusion

Recently, we accidentally left our Math book while traveling and were without it for 6 weeks. While we were extremely happy we had the option to print to continue our lessons, we missed our beautiful, high-quality book and were happy to be reunited. It is my opinion that buying the book is the way to go. No matter which route you choose, it will be the right decision for your family. Happy homeschooling!