The best free math websites for elementary school
Ranked by how much mathematics a child actually does per minute, which is a less flattering measure than it sounds.
Written and checked September 2026. No affiliate links anywhere on this site — we make nothing if you choose a competitor, which is the only reason a comparison page is worth reading.
The list
- Khan Academy — free, nonprofit, K–12, with real instruction attached to the practice. The default answer.
- Ladderbug (free tier) — ours: number sense, bonds, facts within 20 and place value to 100, with mastery tracking and no account. Grades 2–5 are paid.
- PBS Kids Games — free and ad-free for early number sense.
- Boddle — a generous free tier with a large question bank for K–6.
- Math Playground — free, ad-supported, strong on logic puzzles.
- Prodigy — free to play; see the caution above.
- ABCya — free with ads, good for quick drills.
- Blooket / Gimkit — generous free tiers, brilliant for classroom review, not a curriculum.
- Education.com — worksheets, three free a month.
- Beast Academy — not free, but the demo is worth a look if your child finds maths easy.
What separates the good ones
Fractions on a number line. Pie-only teaching reliably produces three specific broken ideas: a quarter is bigger than a third because four is bigger than three; a third plus a third is two sixths; and five thirds is not a real number. A site that only ever draws pizzas is building those.
Fluency without fear. Timed drills on facts a child cannot yet derive teach anxiety, not arithmetic. The sequence has to be strategy first, then automaticity — and the timer should not be visible.
The hard word problems. Most products only generate result-unknown problems ("she had 4, found 3, how many now?"). Start-unknown ("she had some, found 3, now has 7") is dramatically harder and dramatically more diagnostic. Sampling it deliberately is a cheap quality edge that almost nobody takes.
Questions people actually ask
What is the best free maths website for elementary school?
Khan Academy, comfortably, for range and instruction quality — free, K–12, nonprofit. For younger children who need practice rather than lessons, the Ladderbug free tier or Boddle's free tier.
Is Prodigy good for learning maths?
It is very good at getting children to sit down and much weaker at instruction. A 2021 FTC complaint documented nineteen minutes of gameplay containing four maths problems and sixteen membership advertisements.
What should a good maths site do?
Use concrete and pictorial representations before symbols and keep them linked; teach fact fluency by strategy before speed; put fractions on a number line rather than only in pies; and include the hard word-problem structures — start-unknown and compare — not just result-unknown.