Recap and Review of 3rd Grade Charlotte Mason Homeschool Plans, 2020-2021



It feels like forever ago that I posted these homeschool plans. But finally, we have (almost) reached the end of our 180 days of schooling and I can look back on all the things we accomplished this year.

You can read more about John and about how I planned out our homeschool year in the original planning post, but know that he thrives in a physical and practical/mechanical setting and is still building reading fluency, although he loves books and stories. 


Our Timetable for Students in Form IB and Form IA
This year, I created a timetable to schedule the work for a 1st grader and 3rd grader, and it did not work at all as planned!!! Eventually, I hit on a schedule that did work for John, and I just squeezed my 6-year-old first thing while John worked on independent work (1st 3 items on his list) and then took a break.

I didn't love our schedule this year, but we made it work. In the past, we always did piano practice in the afternoon, but it actually worked better cramming into a longer morning because the kids really loved being done with their requirements earlier and it allowed us to get outside more in the afternoon without coming home to another difficult task. 

3rd Grade Charlotte Mason Plans, 2020-2021
I have tried to note in [ ] whether I'm using a free book or how much I paid for each of the resources we are using. I am committed to homeschooling with free or really cheap books as part of our journey to be debt-free while living on one income.

This post contains affiliate links. Read my full disclosure to learn more.

Bible Lessons
Morning time, oral narration after each lesson
We accomplished our plans to read narrative portions of the bible during our morning time during breakfast using the lists available on Ambleside Online and using a New Revised Standard Translation. Unlike Ambleside Online's plans (which coincide with the way Charlotte Mason planned bible lessons) we choose to read only 1 book of the bible at a time instead of alternating between the old and new testaments. We read Exodus, Mark, Joshua, and Judges. 

Language Arts: 
Reading/Literature (5x10min/week one-on-one lesson, 5x15 Explode the Code Online [$40 from Homeschool Buyers Co-op]) 
I knew that John needed more phonics practice to build reading fluency and Explode the Code Online has been a big help with that. After using it 4-5 times a week for a month, I noticed that he was decoding words with more ease. 

Then, I discovered these leveled Primary Phonics readers and purchased several sets from Christian books because John didn't struggle so hard to read them and that built up his confidence. The simple illustrations did not distract him and the storylines were not too babyish even though the reading level was low. 

To take advantage of his emerging reading skills, we hosted our own 30-day read-aloud challenge in September and the "prize" at the end included one of the Dragon Masters series books which are part of scholastics' branches series of early chapter books. The book was so interesting and accessible to John that he read the book himself. He has continued to slowly read through the whole series this year. 

Including the primary phonics and Dragon Master books, he read 34 books on his own this year and I'm so happy that he has reached this milestone. He has also completed Explode the Code Online from near the end of Book 1 (where the very lengthy assessment placed him) to the beginning of Book 4. 

John struggles to focus on reading when there are ANY interruptions. So he has done better with independent daily reading than by reading to me. Once he was happily into his series, I scheduled him to read while his brother practiced piano and, while he has been reading more and more outside that scheduled time, it guarantees that he will read each day. 

Copywork/Handwriting (4x10min/week)
John finished up Beginning Traditional Cursive, Grades 1-3 this year [bought for him last year - $6.99 on Amazon] and completed  Kumon's My Book of Cursive Writing: Words [$7.65 on Amazon]

Just a few weeks ago, he transitioned to writing selections from Spelling Wisdom in cursive in a primary notebook. He finds this hard right now, but he only writes 3-5 words per day.

Spelling (3x10min/week)
John completed Level 1 last year and this year he started to use:
He completed more than half of All About Spelling Level 2 but he hit a wall with it. I just don't think he is reading well enough for studying spelling this way to be useful to him. Explode the Code Online incorporates lots of word building with letters and phonograms so I began to count this as his spelling about halfway through the year.

Poetry (Listen to the same poem read aloud every day for a week at morning time) While I do not follow Ambleside Online's poetry rotation, I do choose the majority of our poets and poems from their collection. We focused on a different poet each term:
  • Term 1: Christina Rossetti
  • Term 2: Carl Sandburg
  • Term 3: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Recitation (3x10min/week)
Each 6-week half-term John worked on reciting beautifully (to the extent that he has memorized or can read) 2 poems and 1 passage or another poem. I pick 2 selections and he picks the other poem with my approval. 

I had planned to use Easy Voice Recorder App to record his pieces for him, but instead, I just kept up with reading them to him most of the time and having him read them to himself the rest of the time. He is finally at the point where he can read his pieces when he knows what they say already. John recited the following:
John also selected 6 other poems to recite.

Other Read Alouds
We are a real aloud family and John loves to be read to. This year we read the following books aloud at lunch:
  • The Prairie Thief by Melissa Wiley
  • The Wild Robot Escapes by Peter Brown
  • My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
  • The Little Duke by Charlotte Yonge
  • The Other Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
  • The Great Cake Mystery by Alexander McCall Smith
  • Frightful's Mountain by Jean Craighead George
  • The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff
  • King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry
  • Alice's Farm by Maryrose Wood
  • The Cat Who Went to Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth
  • Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken
  • A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter
And these books at morning time:
  • A Time for Trolls: Fairy Tales from Norway Told by Asbjornsen and Moe
  • Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang
  • The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: The Story of Dr. Temple Grandin by Julia Finley Mosca
  • Immigrant Architect: Rafael Guastavino and the American Dream by Berta de Miguel, Kent Diebolt and Virginia Lorente
  • The Seed of Compassion: Lessons from the Life and Teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
  • Itzhak: A Boy Who Loved the Violin: The Story of Young Itzhak Perlman by Tracy Newman
  • The Best of Shakespeare, Twelfth Night by E. Nesbit
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Conan Doyle
  • Buddha at Bedtime by Dharmachari Nagaraja
  • Twelfth Night: Manga Shakespeare by Richard Appignanesi
  • The Royal Book of Ballet by Shirley Goulden
  • Favorite Medieval Tales by Mary Pope Osborne
  • The Canterbury Tales Retold by Geraldine McCaughrean

Social Studies: History and Geography
History (2x20min/week, oral narration after each reading)
I created my own booklist and schedule of readings for John as we study the 1900s and we followed my schedule EXCEPT I dropped A Child's First Book of American History halfway through the year. This was our second year using it and it just doesn't work well enough for us to continue it. I thanked it for its service and bartered it away to a homeschooling farmer in exchange for local, organic veggies ;-) I read all of these titles to him, except for the last one.

John worked on his century chart this year . . . it doesn't have a ton of entries but it is a start.

We are not able to come close to covering all of the major events of the 1900s in the time I have allotted for history this year. We supplemented our formal history study with the following read alouds:

Geography (2x15min/week, oral narration after each reading, plus related mapwork that I keyed to the readings) I read all of these titles to John.
I realized that my reading schedule for Our Country and Its People was too ambitious and needed to be spread out more so I had to omit An Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly this year. Maybe another time!

Mathematics
Math (5x20min/week)
John continued to work through Beast Academy, supplemented with any other materials as needed. He started about halfway through Beast Academy, 3B [already owned], and will finish 3C this year. 

Our Beast Academy pace is SLOW, but the understanding it builds is deep so . . . deep breath . . . we are just going to keep working through it. Right now I feel like even if it took us through 7th grade to finish the series it still might be ok, but we can always evaluate again later.

He also used Xtramath [free] daily to solidify his math facts. Full disclosure, John can never seem to get to mastery with Xtramath. I still think it was helpful for him, but he just cannot push himself to come up with his math facts fast enough to satisfy Xtramath that he is ready to move on (even after I tinkered with the teacher controls to give him more time). He worked on addition, subtraction, and multiplication this year but even though he still needs to think about some of the answers we are calling it good enough and moving on.

We did occasionally take a break from Beast Academy to work on
Science
Natural History (2x10min/week, oral narration after each reading) I read all of these titles to John.
We also read The Moon of the Salamanders by Jean Craighead George.

Special Studies (Morning time and object lessons)
I chose the following topics for the year,:
  • Term 1: Wildflowers & Fruits / Birds & Mammals
  • Term 2: Fruit Trees / Birds & Animals (Migration and Hibernation)
  • Term 3: Wildflowers & Trees / Amphibians
I used the rotation found on Sabbath Mood Homeschool to come up with this list. I selected books on these topics and additional living science and natural history books as part of our morning time, but didn't focus on these topics as much as I have in other years. We read the following:
  • Nature Anatomy by Julia Rothman [a birthday gift for Sylvia]
  • Honey Bee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann [owned $1 book sale find]
  • Plant Blossoms by David M. Schwartz [library]
  • Beluga Passage by Linda Lingemann [owned $1 booksale find]
  • From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons [library]
  • Shark Lady: The True Story of How Eugenie Clark Became the Ocean's Most Fearless Scientist by Jess Keating [library]
  • Icebergs and Glaciers by Patricia Lauber [library]
  • Dinosaur Lady: The Daring Discoveries of Mary Anning, The First Paleontologist by Linda Skeer [library]
  • The Magic Anatomy Book by Carol Donner [owned $1 book sale find]
  • The Blue Lobster: a life cycle by Carol and Donald Carrick [owned $1 book sale find]
  • Electricity and Magnetism by Gregory Vogt [owned $1 book sale find]
  • Marie's Ocean by Josie James [library]
  • The Tree Book For Kids and Their Grown-ups by Gina Ingoglia
  • A Drop of Water by Walter Wick [owned $1 book sale find]
  • The Smallest Life Around: Exploring the Invisible World of Microbes with Eight Easy At-Home Experiments by Lucia Anderson 


Nature Notebooking (daily entries, weekly nature watercolor drawings)
John continued his practice of noticing something in nature and dictating it to his father to write in his nature journal every day. Once a week John made a watercolor drawing of his choice in his nature journal. [John already owns all of his nature journal supplies - our supplies and costs here]

Wild + Free Nature Group (4 hours every Friday) [$50/year for our family]
We participated in our weekly year-round nature group at a rural property from August-November and from March onward with a break during the worst of the surge of covid cases. The kids worked together to build large fires, improvised shelters, and even an outdoor urinal. Baby raccoons, deer bones, turtles, salamanders, newts, fish, skinks, and snakes have been some of our favorite nature finds this year.

We also really put a lot of effort into taking family nature hikes on the weekends and have logged many miles and made lots of memories on the trail this year.
It is difficult to keep John out of the water no matter the time of year!


Art & Music
Handicrafts (2x20min/week)
Twice a week, I have scheduled handicrafts during our morning lesson time. I prefer scheduling handicrafts in our morning lesson time because then it happens! But it is so hard when I have a new baby. It was too stressful for me to be very regimented about it this year. We did focus on Sloyd in term 1 and we did make Christmas gifts and do soap carving. John also did do more cooking and baking as well as some loom weaving. It was just more informally than I have in other years.


Singing (2x10min/week)
I choose folk songs each year mainly by browsing Ambleside Online and the book Gonna Sing My Head Off!: American Folk Songs for Children by Kathleen Krull. This year I choose 14 songs, and we got to 10 of them. This is not my favorite subject and when my steam was running out, I put it into a more informal singing in the car category ;-) But we really did learn some new favorites this year.

Artist Study (1xweek at morning time)
This year studied 6 works by the following artists:

Term 1Term 3: Henry Ossawa Tanner [Free PDF artist study from A Humble Place]
Term 2: Peter Paul Rubens [Free PDF artist study from A Humble Place]
Term 3 Term 1: Winslow Homer [Free PDF artist study from A Humble Place]

We had to use digital images to study Tanner because the local print shop didn't return my emails at the beginning of the year (due to the pandemic?). However, I was able to get term 2 and 3s prints done for  $.50 each. 

Composer Study (1x10min week)
This year I planned for us to study one composer per term by listening to their music for 10 minutes a week using the following playlists (pieces selected from ones included on Ambleside Online). But I wasn't getting to it!

Thankfully, Peter really got into Camille Saint Saens Carnival of the Animals and he got his siblings, including John, into it too, so that was great! I subscribed to 6 months of SQUILT Live over the winter and although it did not focus on one composer per term, it did expose the kids to some great pieces and ideas. The live lessons are probably 30 minutes too long for John, but I think they were still good for him. 

Piano (afternoon occupation, 5-6x15min/week)
Hoffman Acadamy [Not an affiliate link! We just love Hoffman Academy.]
John began the year about halfway through Unit 5 and he will finish the year mostly done with Unit 6. He rarely complains about piano practice anymore and he manages his own practice sessions. It is really hard for him if he leaves practice until the afternoon so we try to help him get it done early.

Physical Education
I had originally hoped for more normal activities to resume in 2021, but either that hasn't happened or it hasn't seemed like a good idea so instead of a running club or ice skating lessons, John has gotten his exercise through
  • Ice Skating Lessons (Winter 2021)
  • Hikes, bike rides, and walks around often, including weekly family hikes
  • Wild + Free nature group which gets us active and outside as a family for about 4 hours each week
  • Swimming Lessons (Summer 2021)? 
  • We also bought kayaks this year and are excited about using them a lot this summer . . . once we figure out how to get them on top of our van! We have 3 camping trips planned plus the big kids will plan some overnight backwoods hiking and camping with Dad. 

Final Thoughts
I have sometimes read Charlotte Mason's writings and worried that John was not able to do the things that she described other children being capable of at that age, in terms of reading and memorization. My biggest challenge in implementing this style of education has been to reconcile it with MY child and MY real limitations as a mother with other children to care for. 

I have to focus on her brief synopsis embodied in the 20 principles and verify that I am following this method even if it looks different for John. I can see that John received a full education this year. He took from it what was meaningful to him and has grown a lot as a person, a reader, a thinker, and a tinkerer. 

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4 comments:

  1. AflyonmyhomeschoolwallMay 11, 2021 at 1:39 PM

    I think your final thoughts are profound and true. What a blessing that he has you for his mother/educator--a person who is genuinely trying to not compare him to his academically gifted older brother! I know the trying is harder in real life than it is in theory. :) I have to work on the same with my crew constantly. Each child needs such different things to help him/her grow and learn! My limitations scare me at times. I have to consciously decide to rest in God and trust that my best efforts, while pitiable, are enough in the long run. I truly admire what you do and how you care for each of your children. :)

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    Replies
    1. JenniferMay 11, 2021 at 5:12 PM

      Thank you! It is so hard sometimes to figure out what is right for each child. And what each child needs to thrive. It helps to look back on all the learning and progress that happened. I'm glad I get the chance to do this, but it is hard work.

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  2. LeighAnnaMay 12, 2021 at 10:52 AM

    I'm always so impressed by your accomplishments!! (I still can't get the hang of sticking to a long-term plan across the vicissitudes of a year.) Your homeschool seems so well-rounded, and the thoughtful way you adapt the big picture to the individual's needs is so edifying to read.

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    Replies
    1. JenniferMay 12, 2021 at 6:35 PM

      Just remember, they are older! And all the extra books are not planned, per se, we just read the next thing. This was definitely the hardest year ever with two little ones. They need so much attention and energy, as you know.

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