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Books have been rolling in around here. You know what that means? It’s almost time to start the new school year!!! We’ll be sticking with Heart of Dakota again this year, just like last year. However, we will be breaking sequence and moving ahead to Bigger Hearts for His Glory (we did Little Hearts for His Glory last year, which means we’re skipping Beyond). I am doing this mainly because I did so much supplementing last year that I feel Z is ready to move on, and I don’t want to have to continue supplementing HOD, as it is so well done already. So here’s what we’ve got going this year for 3rd grade:

Core: The backbone of our curriculum will be Bigger Hearts for His Glory from Heart of Dakota. This will cover History, Science, Bible, Art, Reading, Grammar, Spelling, Geography, Poetry, and Handwriting.

Foreign Language: A lot of homeschoolers will teach Greek or Latin at this point, as both are great foundations for English literacy and understanding vocabulary. I see nothing wrong with that and even considered Latin at one point. But then I thought, this is 2013 and we live in California. I personally feel that would be doing my child a huge disservice to not teach him Spanish. So we’ll be using a relatively new, but excellent program called Song School Spanish.

Literature: I have decided to pass on Drawn into the Heart of Reading until levels 6/7/8. This year we’ll be studying the Narnia series and tying it into our bible lessons with the Family Guide to Narnia and a unit study from Rainbow Resource on all 7 books. The unit study is designed to cover each book in 2 weeks, 2 chapters at a time. My plan is to slow these down and stretch each book out to one month.

Life Skills: I really wish that all the nice Home Ec books for kids weren’t totally and obviously geared for girls (or maybe I just haven’t seen one yet). I will be having Z shadow and help me in the kitchen from now on. But I am considering Lessons in Responsibility for Boys as well. I believe too many little black boys don’t get this type of instruction, and it is part of where our community is going wrong.

Math: Z still needs quite a bit of math help to catch up. We will be doing Level One at double speed (for review), and then Level Two at regular speed and on through the summer from Easy Peasy.

Health/PE: From the start of school through December, Z will be playing football. He will get tons of exercise from that. We will also cover select topics from the Lower level of Easy Peasy Health/PE.

Computers: Again with the Easy Peasy! We’ll start with Level One, which covers computer basics, including internet safety, plus Dance Mat Typing.

Music/Black History: This is big to us, as we’re very musical. And the football practice schedule will mean that Z does not get to be in the church choir until Spring. So we’ll be using the music program from Christian Light. Silly me also got the brilliant idea that it was the perfect time for Z to learn the recorder…we’ll see how that goes! And we’ll tie in some Black History using A Celebration of Black History through Music from CurrClick.

And there you have it!!! I know it sounds like a lot. It sounded like a lot while I was writing it and, as usual, I started second-guessing myself! But we won’t be doing every subject every day. I am in the midst of organizing and working out a schedule, which will be in an upcoming post.

What curriculum choices have you made for the upcoming year?

Reading this post in the future? Find out why we’re leaving HOD.