Primary sources at the kitchen table
Everything a homeschooling family needs from CANOA is free and public: 128862 published coin types, 39642 of them with museum photographs, and lesson plans written for one adult and one to six students. There is nothing to install, no account to create, and no learning management system involved.
Start with a free lesson plan Try the demo assignment
No account · no student data collected · works on any browser
How it works without an LMS
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1. Pick a plan
Download the PDF packet: objectives, procedure, handout, rubric. Print it or read it from the screen.
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2. Choose coins
Search the public catalog by ruler, mint, metal or date and open a coin card per student. The card is the worksheet.
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3. Grade with the rubric
Answers are checkable against the catalog record, so you do not need to be a numismatist to mark the work.
Self-paced tracks
The same progression schools use, without the scheduling: start where your student is and move when they are ready.
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Classical Civilization & Art History
Grades 9–12
Iconography, portraiture, and the visual language of power
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Data & Patterns: Hoard and Metrology Analysis
Grades 9–12 · math, statistics, and data-literacy electives
Statistics and graphing on a real archaeological dataset
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Build Your Research Agent
Grades 11–12 · CS, capstone, independent study · in development
Computer science capstone on a public scholarly API
Lesson plans you can teach this week
- Reading Power: Decoding Roman Imperial Coin Legends — AP Latin / Latin III–IV, one 45-minute class period + homework
- Coins as Evidence: A DBQ Without a Document — World History / AP World History · grades 8–12, one 50-minute class period
- Weighing an Empire: Metrology and Debasement — Statistics / data literacy / math elective · grades 9–12, two 45-minute periods (or one block)
Co-ops and umbrella schools
If your co-op already runs a learning management system — some use Canvas Free for Teachers or Moodle — the graded version works exactly as it does for a school: unique coins per student, automatic checking, scores in the gradebook. Registration takes about fifteen minutes once.
Tell us what you are running at edu@canoanumis.org, or use the pilot form — pick the homeschool role and we will not send you a district contract.
What we know about your child: nothing
Using the public catalog and the lesson plans, we receive no information about your student at all — there is no account, no login, and no submission sent to us. If you later run the graded version through a co-op's LMS, we receive an anonymous identifier issued by that LMS and the answers themselves. Never a name, an email, or a photo.
Details: student privacy policy.