Curriculum choices for Year Three.

Recently, I wrote about our choices for Year One curriculum for Youngest Son. His sister is just over two years older, aged seven. The choices for Year Three have been difficult: there is so much that Younger Daughter finds interesting and so many fascinating choices. Then there has been a difficult balance around reading. Younger Daughter has found reading difficult. Yes, she has made progress particularly over the last six months but she hasn't achieved her long standing ambition to read The Secret Garden. Perhaps, this year. So, trying to balance reading and other subjects has been challenging. 

The curriculum here is the skeleton. We fill in with many other resources. For example, we use literature to support English and history.

Bible
 I am currently reading Leading Little Ones to God with the children and hope to continue doing this. We work on learning a verse a week. My plan is to continue doing this from a psalm so we can learn larger portions. We have a hymn of the week using hymns that are often sung in church.

English
This year, we plan to carry on using the Rod and Staff reader with the accompanying reading and phonics workbooks. I hope to link spelling in with the phonics. The reading will continue to be daily whereas grammar, writing and comprehension will take turns though the week.

I have recently reviewed WriteShop and I hope to continue using this flexible curriculum for writing.
Much grammar will be informal in our morning Circle Time but I have Galore Park Junior English One to use if we need something more formal and also for comprehension. 

Maths
This coming year, I plan to spend ten minutes each day practicing tables and mental maths. I have several plans for working on tables (hopefully a post, at some point).
In addition, we plan to use the Galore Park Junior Maths book 1. Middle Son used the Galore Park books and this worked well for him. I don't bother with the answer book for the Junior books but found that having one saved time, once we used the main So you want to learn maths books.

Science
The Apologia, Flying Creatures book is our plan. We found the Human Anatomy and physiology a little difficult for a seven year old. I'm hoping that Flying Creatures  is a little easier!

History
This is where life starts to get complicated. We were gradually working through to modern times and were due to study the First World War this autumn. Then, I had the offer to review the lovely Veritas self-paced history. We looked at the modern course but this was US history so went for the Greeks/Romans and New Testament. We loved this course so now I have to decide whether to go on with the First World War or carry on with the Veritas. I'm hoping that it might be possible to call Veritas Classical Civilisation and manage both!

Geography
This is much simpler, I think. We have purchased the Veritas geography curriculum, Legends and Leagues. A lesson a week should get us happily through the course. Of course, there will be some geography in with the history and just in life.

Art
In the last term, we started to use Artistic Pursuits. Younger Daughter loves this and would do a lesson a day. I haven't moved art into the everyday category although I'm not going to stop her doing extra later in the day.

Spanish
I'm really in two minds about this. We have done a little Spanish over the last year. Younger Daughter finds phonics difficult in English so I have some reluctance about doing more formal language. However, I don't want to take away the opportunity to learn another language. I was impressed with Homeschool Spanish Academy which I reviewed last year. The final decision needs to be made in the next few weeks!

Music
We plan that this will be the year when Younger Daughter starts piano lessons. I have been teaching her, very slowly, on our American organ but she is ready for something more formal. I also hope that we will listen to our History of Classical Music.

Physical activity
Younger Daughter has swimming lessons and we try to go outside most days. There are various ideas around about more sport but nothing decided yet!

Do you have any curriculum that you would recommend for this age group? I feel that I have left out a fair amount. For example, at some point, in the next year or so, we need to fit in some typing. There is a limited amount of time and I don't want to cause overload. Any thoughts on balance?

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