How I Got Through a Full Year With Big History Project
I started using Big History Project with my kid about three years ago. We went through the entire Grade 7 course end to end. The curriculum is free, it's well put together, and it covers everything from the Big Bang to the modern era. But it's not plug-and-play. You need to know how to actually make it work for a home setting. The core of the program is the Big History Project Homeschool track. Stanford runs it. Every lesson includes a video, reading, discussion questions, and assessments. The big draw is that it ties science and history together, which most traditional curricula don't bother with. My kid went in hating history class. This approach actually made it stick. Here's the thing nobody tells you about the free version. The assessments are there, but they're mostly multiple choice and short answer. If you want a real transcript or anything that looks like a traditional grade, you're on your own for documentation. I ended up creating my own rubric-based grading sheet because our state required a documented scale for our high school credits later on. That took about forty-five minutes upfront and saved me hours over the year.
What Actually Happens Day to Day
Each lesson is broken into sections. You watch the video, read the accompanying text, and answer the questions. The videos are where most people get stuck because they're long. The "The Why of History" introduction alone is nearly an hour. I found myself skipping ahead just to see where it was going, which isn't the point. The trick I used was to let my kid watch the video at 1.5x speed. Most of the narrators don't speak slowly enough to warrant normal playback. The second pass, if needed, is at normal speed. This cut our daily time from about ninety minutes to roughly forty-five. You lose nothing and keep more of it. There's also a teacher guide section most people miss. It's freely available on the BHP site and contains the answer key, suggested discussion prompts, and some extension activities. I wish I'd looked there first instead of guessing at the answers for weeks.
The Lesson Structure and Timeline
The course is organized into ten chapters. Each chapter has multiple lessons. The chapters go roughly like this: Origins of Complexity, Early Human Society, Agriculture, Cities and Empires, Global Networks, Revolutions, Industrialization, Acceleration, the Modern Era, and the Future. It's a lot of ground to cover. We did one lesson every other day. Some lessons are shorter than others. The unit on the Silk Road took us three sessions. The chapter on scientific revolutions took us five. I'd budget about two and a half months for the full course at that pace. Going faster means you're skimming, and this curriculum actually rewards slow reading. One edge case that caught me off guard: the chapter on the 1918 influenza pandemic and World War I has some dense source analysis work. My kid got bogged down for days on just two primary sources because the questions expect a certain level of historical reasoning. The workaround was to do the first source together line by line, then let her do the next one solo. It unblocked her in about twenty minutes.
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What the Curriculum Doesn't Cover Well
It's not great at math or science beyond what's woven into the narrative. If you're using this as your sole history curriculum, you'll need a separate math program, obviously. But even as a history supplement, the science depth is surface level. The cosmology chapters are fun but not rigorous. If your kid gets curious about actual astrophysics, you'll want a different resource for that thread. The worldview is secular. That's fine for a public-school-aligned curriculum but worth knowing if you're in a faith-based homeschool environment. Some parents have reported awkward conversations around the origins chapters. We didn't have major issues, but I did skip the most detail-heavy sections on human evolution and replaced them with our own material. It took about ten minutes of prep. There's no built-in parent progress tracker. The platform shows completion percentages per lesson, but if you have more than one student or need to export data for records, you're looking at spreadsheets. I built a simple Google Sheet that pulled the completion data and added my own grades. The whole thing was maybe an hour of work and worked fine for our state reporting.
How to Access It
You can get started at bighistoryproject.com. There's a dedicated homeschool section. Sign up takes about five minutes. Everything is free. No subscription, no trial period, no paywall after the initial content. Some of the supplementary materials on the site require a teacher account, but the core lessons are open to everyone. If you want the printable student packets and some of the extra practice sets, those require a free teacher registration. It's not a paid tier, just a different login. I'd recommend registering anyway because the downloadable PDFs are useful for kids who prefer paper over screens.
Bottom Line
This is a solid curriculum for kids who need context before they care about dates and names. It won't fix a broken reading level on its own. It won't replace a proper science course. But as a standalone history sequence, it's one of the better free options out there and it's genuinely rigorous if you push through the slow parts.
