Third Grade Curriculum Thoughts

These are my thoughts on the Curriculum we used during 2016/2017 school year for Third Grade.

Overall most of our curriculum was a good fit and we worked our way through it. Some of the curriculum was not a good fit and I will tell you which ones we ended up getting rid of and what I replaced it with! 

Math- Saxon Math 3

This was a great fit for my son. He loved how hands on it was and how well explained it was. I really enjoyed teaching from the Teachers Handbook. We plan to use Saxon for 4th grade this next school year!

Language Arts- First Language Lesson, Level 3

This was one that I gritted my teeth through the whole year. My son did not like it as it was mainly diagramming. I can honestly say we will not be using this the next school year. It just was not a good fit. I feel that Language Arts should be more about structures of sentence writing and more about learning parts of speech. This did touch a little on that but not enough for my liking. 

History- America From the Beginning 

This was one of the books we stopped pretty early on. It was too much reading and just didn't catch my kids attention very well. They were very bored with it and I felt there had to be another option that worked for them better. We ended up using Easy Peasy All in One Homeschool for the remainder of the year and it was a much better fit!

Science- God's Design For Life, Plants, Animals, and Human Body

I liked this Science curriculum. It was very easy to plan with and to teach. We did not get to the Human Body though as my kids started to show signs of interest in Space so I decided to take that interest and find online resources we could use instead. We did do plants and animals and really enjoyed it!

Literature- Classic Literature, Volume 1 

I loved this curriculum! Although we only used a few units from it and ended up just reading books for our Literature time instead of doing activities. It was more enjoyable for my kids to just have read aloud time.

Geography- Road Trip USA

We worked through this curriculum slowly as I wanted them to really learn about each state. We will be continuing on with learning our States this next year. It is a great curriculum I just feel my kids needed a little more with it like using an Atlas and online resources with it. 

Handwriting- Handwriting Without Tears, Cursive Success

Handwriting was another area my son struggled with. He was not ready to start cursive so I decided to focus on building his foundation on printing before continuing on to actual cursive. He also struggled with writing on just notebook paper so that is another area we focused on. We will try cursive this next year!

Writing- Spectrum Grade 3 and Reading- Spectrum Grade 3

I grouped these together because I absolutely hated them as a curriculum for my son. I just did not like them at all. We tried to use them and  ended up just focusing on individual things instead. 

Spelling- Grade 3 List

This worked well but I am looking into something a little more structured for this next year. I want to have activities to do with the spelling words. This is a great basic as it is just the lists. I had my son write the words on one day, then alphabetize them, and other activities. I just think it would be nicer to have a workbook with activities for each list instead. 

Art- World's Greatest Artist, Volume 1

I loved this curriculum. However, my boys just didn't find it interesting. I am holding on to it for the future. We ended up just doing fun crafts from pinterest most of the year. He really enjoyed that and it worked! 

Overall most of our curriculum was a good fit! I learned a lot about what works for my children from this year which made picking curriculum for this next year much easier. 

These opinions are my own and not everyone may agree with them. This is just to share what we ended up using for the school year and what didn't work for my child.

You will notice some links have been removed due to not promoting a curriculum I was not happy with! 

To see the curriculum we had planned on using and explanations from the beginning of the school year check out our Third Grade Curriculum post.