| Third Grade |
| This year has been an exciting one. Our student continues to progress in his school studies and in his martial arts studies. A major focus this year has been the study of the history, geography and culture of China. This is a result of interest shown on the part of the child. Using videos, books, and crafts we have spent the year on China and have enjoyed every minute. We made papier-mache dragon masks, red paper banners with Chinese fortune phrases, painted landscapes, played mahjongg, practiced eating with chopsticks and even learned to read and write many Chinese characters. We found lots of fun projects to do in the Hands On Heritage book CHINA, the ISBN is 1-56472-069-1 from Edupress. Here's a link to the book at ADDALL.com Some of the videos we enjoyed were: The Good Earth Dragon Seed The Legend of Drunken Master Once Upon a Time in China I, II and III Little Buddha (I realize that these are not all historically correct, but it is easy enough to cover these things in discussions afterwards. I looked for movies that would put a "picture" in his mind of Ancient Chinese and Asian culture.) We found some wonderful books at our local library that we used for read alouds: The Chinese Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins Little Pear by Eleanor Frances Lattimore Kung Fu for Young People by Ted Manusco China, a new true book by Karen Jacobson We also covered the usual subjects: Math, Reading, Spelling, Phonics, Handwriting, Religion and Science. A few books that our student enjoyed reading this year were: Prairie School by Avi The Poppleton series by Cynthia Rylant Jackie Chan Adventure series by John Rogers Sleeping Ugly by Jane Yolen Tony's Birds by Millicent Selsam Very Big Sharks by Victor Gentle Some of these books were read for Reading class and others for Science class. In handwriting, student interest led to beginning cursive. We use the Italic handwriting system, which has resulted in a very nice hand. Our student can read the cursive handwriting of others IF it is neat. Here's a link to the book at Amazon.com. For the Fourth Grade, we will be using Saxon Math 5/4. We have been using Math-U-See, but this year we did lots of review, drill and skill building in the basics of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division. I feel the methods used in Saxon will be invaluable for him as we move ahead. We have used Saxon with our high school student and it has been very successful. I understand that the program is strong from 3rd grade on. Home |