Finding good learning materials for children in Northern Ghana is a genuine challenge. Textbooks are shared, supplementary work is thin on the ground, and a parent or teacher who wants to help often ends up searching the internet with no clear idea what is worth using. This guide covers what actually helps, what it costs, and the practical constraints — data, power, and paying in foreign currency — that most resource lists ignore.
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Start with the curriculum, not the website
The most common mistake is collecting impressive-looking resources that do not match what the child is actually being taught. In Ghana that means the Ghana Education Service (GES) curriculum is your reference point, and the BECE is the milestone that matters for basic education.
A resource is only useful if it reinforces what is being taught in class. A beautifully designed American worksheet on a topic your child has not reached is just noise — and it can confuse rather than help.
So before you use anything: ask your child’s teacher what topic is being covered this term, then find material on that. It sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it.
What Education.com offers
Education.com is an established library of worksheets, games, lesson plans and guided exercises covering a wide range of ages and subjects. Its main strength for a parent or teacher is volume and organisation — instead of assembling material yourself from scattered sources, you search by subject and level.
Its main limitation is the same as every international provider: it is built around a different curriculum. The maths concepts will overlap heavily with GES teaching; the language, history and social studies content will not map as cleanly.
Explore Education.com resources
The practical constraints nobody mentions
Data
Printable worksheets are the right format here, precisely because they are light. Download once, print, and the child works offline. Video-heavy interactive content is the opposite: expensive in data and unusable when the connection drops.
Practical approach: if you have a smartphone, download a batch of worksheets while you have data or wifi, then print them at a business centre in town. The printing cost is usually lower than the data cost of streaming the same content.
Power
Anything requiring a charged device is a risk. Printed material is not. This is a strong argument for worksheets over apps in most Northern Ghana households.
Paying in foreign currency
Most international education platforms charge in US dollars. That means the cost in cedis changes with the exchange rate, and any subscription is an ongoing foreign-currency commitment. Consider carefully whether you want a recurring international subscription for something you can partly get free.
We do not quote subscription prices here — they change, and a stale figure would mislead you. Check the current price on the provider’s site.
Free options worth using first
- Past BECE questions. Available in print locally and widely used for revision. For exam preparation, past papers beat almost any subscription.
- The teacher yourself. The single most effective free resource is twenty minutes asking the teacher what the child is struggling with.
- Free worksheet libraries. Several reputable sites offer free printable material; a paid library’s value is mostly convenience and organisation, so decide whether that convenience is worth the subscription.
- Reading, habitually. For literacy, regular access to any interesting reading material outperforms structured exercises. A library card or a stack of second-hand readers goes a long way.
For teachers
Lesson-plan libraries are genuinely useful when you are teaching a subject for the first time or need to vary your approach for a class that is not responding. But adapting takes time. A plan designed for a class of twenty with tablets needs real rewriting for a class of sixty sharing textbooks.
The useful habit: take the structure — the sequence of a lesson, the questions asked — and supply your own local examples and materials. That is usually faster than writing from scratch, and it keeps the lesson relevant to your pupils.
A realistic plan
- Ask the teacher what this term’s topics are.
- Get past questions for exam years — locally, in print.
- Download a batch of printable worksheets on those exact topics while you have data.
- Print them at a business centre and keep a folder per subject.
- Only then consider a paid subscription, if you find you are consistently running out of material.
That approach costs very little, does not depend on a reliable connection, and keeps the work aligned with what your child is actually being examined on.
Frequently asked questions
Is Education.com suitable for the Ghanaian curriculum? Partly. Maths and basic literacy overlap well. Language, history and social studies are built around a different curriculum and need more filtering.
Do I need a printer? Not at home — a business centre in Tamale can print a batch cheaply. This is the most data-efficient way to use online worksheets.
Is it worth a subscription for one child? Usually not, given the free alternatives. It becomes better value for a teacher, a large family, or a household where several children need material regularly.
What about learning on a phone? Fine for short practice, poor for sustained study. If a phone is all you have, printed worksheets and past questions remain the better option.
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