What Good Free Learning Sites Are Best For Kids? A Parent-Teacher’s Tried and Tested List
Last Tuesday, I was staring at a stack of ungraded 7th grade argumentative essays at the kitchen table, my tea gone cold, when my 10-year-old slouched over from the couch, half-chewed granola bar crumbs down his hoodie. He’d already finished his optional school homework, burned through two episodes of his favorite cartoon, and was bored of watching 10-minute videos of people building Lego castles. “Mom,” he said, “I want to learn about active volcanoes. What site do I go to that doesn’t have all those weird pop-ups?”
I get this question all the time. When I was teaching hybrid during the pandemic, half the emails I got from parents weren’t about grades or Zoom links. They were asking the same thing my son just did: what sites can I use to learn that are safe, free, and not just mind-numbing worksheets? I’ve been curating a list for years, ever since I let my son use a random “dinosaur activity” site when he was 7 and ended up closing three separate pop-up ads for weight loss medication before I could get to the actual coloring sheet.
First, the go-to for elementary age kids who want to explore something random is National Geographic Kids. That’s where I sent my son for volcanoes last week. It’s all written at a level a 10-year-old can follow, full of big, bright photos and silly little quizzes that don’t feel like work. He spent 45 minutes clicking through photos of the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption, and didn’t get hit with a single ad for kids’ toys or auto-play videos. If your kid is obsessed with sharks, or rainforests, or wild horses, this is the first place I send people.
For older kids, or anyone into art or history, the big museum sites are unbelievable, and they’re completely free. My niece is 14, and last semester she had a research paper on Frida Kahlo. She didn’t have to drive an hour and a half to the nearest big museum to see her work—she used the Met’s 360° virtual tours, and walked through the entire Frida & Diego exhibit from her bedroom. The Louvre, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, all of them have free online content for all ages, from kid-friendly scavenger hunts to deep dives for high school research projects. NASA’s site is another gem for space-obsessed kids—my son spent three days last summer scrolling through James Webb Telescope photos, printing out his favorites to tape to his bedroom wall, and never ran into a single ad.
If your kid needs practice with math or reading, and you don’t want to pay for a monthly subscription, Khan Academy is still the best thing out there. I know it looks like a regular school tool, and if you force your kid to do an hour of math a day on it, it’ll feel like extra school. But if they use it to dig into something they care about, it’s magic. Last summer, my son wanted to figure out how big the biggest volcano in the solar system is (it’s Olympus Mons on Mars, for anyone curious). He worked through three Khan Academy geometry lessons to learn how to calculate volume, and never complained once that it was homework. It’s all free, no hidden fees, and tracks progress if you want it to, but you don’t even have to make an account if you just want to pull up one quick lesson.
One thing most people don’t think about is checking your local library’s website. Almost every public library gives free access to paid learning sites with just your library card number. My library gets us free access to Creative Bug, which has thousands of video classes for everything from knitting to watercolor to paper mache. For high school kids who want to learn things like graphic design or photography or even how to write a resume, most libraries have free access to LinkedIn Learning too. I don’t know any parent who wants to add another $15 a month subscription to their credit card, so this is a game-changer no one talks about much.
For short, engaging lessons on just about anything, TED-Ed is my go-to. They’re 5 to 10 minute animated videos that cover everything from how bees communicate to why we get nightmares, and they’re made with actual educators. My son will watch three of them while I’m getting dinner ready, and every night he comes to the table with some weird new fact he wants to tell us. For older kids who want to know how everyday things work, HowStuffWorks is great—they explain everything from how car engines work to how 5G works in plain language, no confusing jargon.
I think a lot of parents buy into the idea that good learning content has to cost money, or that it has to be aligned to some state curriculum to be useful. But most of the time, when kids ask to learn about something, it’s because they’re curious. The best thing we can do is give them a safe place to follow that curiosity, without making it feel like another chore. I keep my list of trusted sites saved in a bookmarks folder on my laptop, so I don’t have to dig through pages of sketchy Google results when my son comes over with a new question.
That snow day, my son ended up printing out a dozen volcano photos, and we spent the rest of the afternoon making a paper mache model that erupted baking soda all over my dining table. There’s still a faint red stain on the tablecloth from the food coloring. Last night, he came to me asking how they actually make Lego bricks, so I pulled up HowStuffWorks and he spent an hour clicking through photos of factories. I still get at least two emails a week from other parents asking for my list of sites, and I send it over, always with a casual note that it’s okay if they don’t use it most days. Some days, curiosity hits, and some days they just want to watch people unbox Lego. And that’s fine.
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