4th Grade Homeschool Curriculum Lineup

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We are about to kick off our fifth year of homeschooling and we are excited about the new adventures that await us! Today, I’m going to share our 4th grade homeschool curriculum choices for Big Sis. Yes, that’s right she’s in 4th grade now and Little Sis is in 1^st grade. Wow, how did that happen?! It seems like yesterday that I was wringing my hands about what I would use for my first year of homeschooling kindergarten year. 

Each year the decisions get easier as we find our groove. We have found programs that work well for us so it’s easy to progress onto the next level. I’m not one to keep switching things up…unless of course something isn’t working for us. There are so many options out there for homeschool curriculum. It’s easy to want to try everything but that makes consistency really difficult. Most of the new programs we add are because of adding new elements or subjects. Here’s what we have lined up for 4th grade for this coming school year.

 

History and Literature

We will be starting the first of two years of American history with BookShark’s Level 3 Reading with History. This program includes history, readers, and read aloud books.  I also snagged the optional lap book. This year all of the read alouds and her readers will tie in directly with the history portion. When we first started homeschooling, I was looking at Sonlight and saw that it’s often recommended to wait until 4^th grade for their Core D. Well, this is it. We’re finally here…although with BookShark (Sonlight’s sister company). This is where the work is supposed to take a big jump in content and maturity.

 

She was really excited to see the huge pile of books! I, on the other hand, was a bit overwhelmed and actually had to put it all away for about 2 months. I was so excited to get it and start looking through everything but I just couldn’t. It really is a huge pile of books! However, I’ve been reassured by those who’ve come before me that we’ll be just fine. I’m going to trust their wisdom. We’re going to get a bit of an early start (at least for history and science). I want to start early because it looks like a lot of work. She wants to start early because she is really excited to jump into these books!

 

Reading

This is the first year that I don’t have to get a reading program for her.  She finished the fourth and final level of All About Reading in the middle of last year. She has transitioned from the “learning to read” stage to the “reading to learn” stage. Now, she’ll have her BookShark readers and any other books that she wants to read just for fun. Because there are so many fantastic readers with BookShark, I don’t get too picky about what she’s reading for fun. I’m not too opposed to twaddle for her at this point because most of what she chooses is decent quality. I ordered the advanced readers packages which has an additional 8 books scheduled for a grand total of 21 readers! I’m not sure if we’ll get to all of them because I don’t really consider her an advanced reader, but she is excited for American history so maybe she will blow through these books quickly.

 

Science

Each year I compare BookShark and Sonlight’s science programs. My girls love science so I pick the one that seems to have the most content after subtracting the religious books from the Sonlight program. There was one year that it made more sense to go with Sonlight, but we’ve stuck with BookShark’s science for the last two years. This year we’ll be doing BookShark’s level 3 program. I’m also adding in American Girl’s The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Younger Girls.  I grabbed the matching journal too.  This book is in BookShark’s level 5 science, but waiting two years for it is too long.  I think it will be good for this year.

 

Math

We’ll be continuing with Singapore Primary Mathematics. We’ve been trying to continue with math all summer because progress was slow last year. Consistency has been tough though because we’ve had summer camp and vacations. She’s on track to finish 3A in time to officially start our new school year with 3B. It seems that Singapore is about half a year ahead of our local schools so that means she’s about on track even though she won’t start level 4 right away at the start of 4^th grade. We were really good at doing math an average of 5 days a week last year. She definitely worked hard so I feel good about where she is. Surprisingly, I found out last year that she really likes to do math drill worksheets instead of flash cards or even math games. Now, she does one drill worksheet every day in addition to her regular lesson. Check out Math Fact Cafe to make your own free custom worksheets.

 

Spelling

She finished level 4 of All About Spelling towards the end of 3^rd grade. I had level 5 ready to go and hoped to get about a month or two into it before the end of the school year, but things came up and we didn’t get very far. We’ll pick it up from the beginning for 4^th grade. I know some people drop a formal spelling program around this time and just use copywork and dictation as spelling instruction. Some people use just copywork and dictation for spelling from the beginning too. For us, I really like the step by step methodical way that All About Spelling is laid out. I love their reading program for the same reasons. And more importantly, it’s been very effective.

Related Post – Using Phonics Rules or Sight Words?

 

 

Handwriting

We’re continuing Peterson Directed Handwriting. Unfortunately, handwriting is the first thing to get dropped when the day gets busy. We had a really crazy year with afternoon and evening activities last year. It was often a struggle to get everything done. We used the weekends to catch up when possible, but it was still tough. So, we didn’t get very far with handwriting. She finished the 2^nd grade level which introduces a basic version of cursive.  It looks like the 3^rd grade level focuses on cursive fluency and size reduction. I’m hoping that she’ll move quickly through this level and finish it well before the end of the 4^th grade. I’ll start to transition her to using cursive for her copywork for additional practice. She’s been fairly resistant about that so far. And this coming year, our activities are pared down to a more reasonable level so hopefully handwriting won’t get dropped so often.

 

Brave Writer – The Rest of Language Arts

This is very different from the All About Spelling approach I mentioned above and I had a hard time wrapping my head around it in the beginning. But I LOVE using copywork and dictation with the books that we’re already reading with BookShark. We’ll be continuing with Brave Writer’s Arrow product which is the program that uses copywork and dictation to teach language arts. Brave Writer has Arrows for 6 of the BookShark level 3 books and a Boomerang for another book. The Boomerang may be too hard since it’s for older kids. So, I may scale it back or just wing it. Last year we did 7 Arrows which felt like a strong, but not overwhelming, pace. We’ll also be using Partnership in Writing which is the program for writing projects. We’ve used Jot it Down for the last few years and last year Storyteller wasn’t really into it. This is another program that gets dropped easily, so there were plenty of project ideas that we hadn’t done yet.  I’m going to see if the Partnership level will interest her this year. Fingers crossed!

 

Fix it Grammar – And one more Language Arts

This year we’ll be adding in a separate grammar program. When I first started looking at language arts programs (outside of Sonlight and BookShark), I was undecided between IEW and Brave Writer. I know…two VERY different programs! I don’t know about the other IEW products but it looks like Fix it Grammar is very compatible with the Brave Writer approach. We’ll be using The Nose Book which is the first in the series. Each book is supposed to take one year. After reading through it a bit and watching a few videos from IEW, it seems similar to Brave Writer but more guided like All About Reading and Spelling. Grammar is taught by having the student fix errors within short passages of a long story that continues for the whole level. The corrected passages are then copied each day so at the end of the year the student has the whole story corrected and copied in their own hand. I think this will tie in nicely with our other language arts programs.

Those are the big pieces of our 4^th grade homeschool curriculum choices.  Of course, we’ll be adding in extras like music, art, critical thinking activities, games, sports activities…and of course unlimited library trips.  We’re continuing with some favorites and trying some new programs.  I’m looking forward to this lineup!

 

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