3rd Grade Curriculum

A few months ago I posted what we will be using as far as curriculum goes.  Today I am going to give a little bit more detail about how I am going to be using them.

For Elijah who will be entering the 3rd grade, we chose to use My Fathers World Adventures in US History.  In this program we will be studying about american history beginning with Vikings and moving on to learn how each state came into the union.  We will be reading lots of great books that go along with this time period.

My Fathers World has a built in reading time that they call Book Basket time, we will use this as our reading program this year.  Elijah is a very good reader and does well at comprehension, so I don't feel that a formal program is necessary for him.  Although we will be doing some reading comprehension tests through out the year, just to make sure he is still doing well.

There is also a built in Bible program, which we will be using loosely this year.  We also do the AWANA program so I don't want to bog them down with too much.

We will also be continuing on with Math U See.  Last year in January we began using this program and started in Alpha.  This year we will be working through Beta, which expands on Adding and Subtracting multiple digits.

For English we will be focusing on proper writing techniques, sentence structure, parts of speech, picture study and writing reports.  Our text will be English for the Thoughtful Child  volume One.  This is a completely different direction than what we did last year.

In handwriting we will begin to transition to cursive writing.  We are going to be using A Reason for Handwriting the Transition book.

Something new we are adding this year is a language study.  We will be studying Latin this year, using Song School Latin level 1.  We have worked partially through one lesson so far and I think Elijah enjoys it, and Noah might warm up to it eventually.

We are going to continue on using All About Spelling, that program has worked wonders for him.  We are on Level 3 this year.

Elijah is also going to begin doing some piano lessons at home this year.  We have the program Piano is Easy, which comes with a teaching DVD and CD.  He worked a little during the summer and really enjoys it, but still struggles realizing that it takes practice to learn something new.

He will be doing an online typing program, called BBC Typing.  I have tried to find a program that we can install on our computer, but finding a good one to run on a MAC is a little harder than I  had thought.  So until we can find one he will use that one.

My Fathers World has an art program but we will not be using it, instead we will be adding in Draw Write Now books 2 and 5.  They correlate really well with what we are studying this year.  It won't be a weekly thing, just whenever I find one that goes with a unit.

That about sums up our 3rd grader!