Third Grade Curriculum

River loves doing what Sunshine does

This year we're continuing with the curriculum suggestions from The Well Trained Mind that we've been using, with just a few changes. Follow the links to see what we did in second grade (and end of second grade) and first grade.

The subjects we're covering this year:

Reading, writing, spelling, grammar, math, science, history/geography, music, art, Japanese, Latin, phys. ed, and religion.

We're continuing with the books we've used in the past for most of the subjects since they're working- we won't rock the boat. We're also doing pretty much the same extra-curriculars as last year.

The changes:
Last spring we started using a math workbook from Target while continuing with Life of Fred. We'll start Singapore math when she finishes the Target workbook. It's ironic that the cheap workbook is working a lot better than the expensive Math-U-See and RightStart Math books. Too bad we didn't discover that before I bought all those expensive materials.

On the up-side, as I've decluttered I've unearthed all our unused/discarded curriculum and plan on selling them and getting at least some of our money back. The books that we liked I'll save for River. I'll only need to buy the workbooks and consumable pages for most of the subjects so it will save us money.

Last spring we finally bit the bullet and purchased Rosetta Stone Japanese. I never got around to setting it up before the end of second grade, but I got it up and running for third grade. So far it is working so much better than everything I tried to do with Sunshine. Well worth the money. I purchased the homeschool version and you can make different accounts for different family members. Four total, I think? I haven't spent a lot of time on it yet, but I've been able to zip through what I have done. I'm remembering more than I thought I did (though I have a long way to go before I get to my previous fluency level), and I've been able to start using more Japanese when I talk to the kiddos.

We started Latin this year. We're using Prima Latina, and so far I like it. It seems to have enough repetition for Sunshine to remember things, but not so much that she gets bored. I will say that we skip over the prayers in Latin since they don't have any application for us. There's also a cd that we listen to for help with pronunciation. Sunshine commented on the lady's southern accent :) 

I'm looking forward to learning enough Latin and Japanese that we can read Harry Potter in those languages. We don't have them in Latin yet, but we own all the books in Japanese and we even have the audio version of the first book in Japanese. It was ridiculously expensive a few years ago because we had to purchase it from Amazon Japan, though the price for the second book isn't quite so bad, so maybe we'll add that to our collection. They're great listening practice though the narrator talks super fast so you really have to concentrate.

So that's what we have planned for the year, along with our extra stuff that I wrote about here. This year I'm going to try really hard to keep to our schedule so we're not playing catch-up at the end :)

too cute!