I’m calling this year advanced second. Lil’ Bit essentially did K a year early and though she is at a third grade level in many subjects, she is at/below grade level in a few due to me just not getting there. Because of my not-so-great health right now, we are going to spend time concentrating on the holes and building good habits and relationships before we jump into the more advanced work that comes with third grade. I think we will all benefit from a little break and she will be right on par with her peers.

In the 3 months since I wrote my first draft of this post, I have almost entirely revised it 4 separate times. Hopefully, this is it! I am hoping to use a lot more books and be a lot more relaxed. This year, also I have fewer must do’s on my list and a whole lot of extra stuff to do in winter when she is bored :).

Religion/Bible – Bible Study Guide 4 All Ages

We will work through Bible Study Guide 4 All Ages again this year after a year hiatus.

For our Catholic/religion, we will be using our saints books from the Saint Picture Book Club and also using the suggested texts from Mater Amabilis, the Catholic CM site.

I’m pausing on the Faith & Life because she already did the second grade work and passed with flying colors. I think she starts reconciliation prep this year and we will probably do some extras around that, too.

In addition, I have a list of religious reading, hymns to learn, things to memorize and such from Classically Catholic Memory (Beta Year). We aim at a mix of classical & Charlotte Mason here :).

Memoria Press – Second Grade

Like with the Little Lady, we are using mostly the Memoria Press Second Grade curriculum. I had actually purchased some third grade stuff and was all ready to do that when I had a change in heart and decided it couldn’t ALL be really hard. I can’t help tweaking it though, so we have a few substitutions :).

We are eliminating Prairie School as one of the literature options. It just seems TOO easy for her. I know she will enjoy the others, though.
She will also do the Kindergarten Art Cards with her sister since I already have those.
She also learned Cursive last year and so we biffed New American Cursive 2 and just kept the copybook. She will do other cursive copywork until the plans call for the book we have.
Phonics and Math will be substituted with other resources (as I share below).

Otherwise, everything is pretty much the same.

Math – Math Mammoth

I was going to use CTC, but after reading The Conversation and The Core, I’ve decided that I REALLY want her to have a great base with her core math skills. I have all the math mammoth books and will use those to really solidify addition and subtraction until she gets those math facts up, down and backwards! We will play games, too.

Language Arts – Writing With Ease 2 & Essentials

We are going to change out their phonics because we have Logic Of English Essentials already and that covers the Advanced Phonograms AND the spelling rules. We will skip the grammar sections because if we do MP next year, English Grammar memorization is one of the courses.

I had considered doing First Language Lessons 2 for grammar, but I changed my mind. Instead, we are going to use that time for Writing With Ease 2 and get a little practice with copywork, narration and dictation using a sort of Charlotte Mason approach to composition by copying excellent works of fiction.

Science & Enrichment — MP Second

We will also be getting all the science and enrichment books (as well as the read-alouds) for second grade. Luckily, they seem to merge pretty well with the kindergarten books and many overlap, so yay for simplicity!

We will also be reading Pocketful of Pinecones and doing regular nature study because, you know, we do Charlotte Mason, too.

Foreign Language – Song School Spanish

The principal demanded a foreign language and was not appreciative of my quest for Latin. I decided that Song School Spanish would be great for BOTH girls (that simplicity thing again) and so we will give that a try. My second grader will do the workbook and both will listen and play the games.

I have not yet decided if we will do Prima Latina this year. It’s in the MP plans for second and I *was* planning to do it this year before I changed my plans 100 times. I may try it and see how it goes. It has great potential to be dropped like a hot potato, though!

Typing – Mickey’s Typing Adventure

The principal also requested that typing be added to our plan for the year and we will use Mickey’s Typing Adventure (which we’ve had for awhile). She has been working in our office and doing such a great job that I think he wants to get her doing some REALLY useful things :).

Winter Boredom Subjects

Because winter days get long, and there are things I don’t want to stress about, I have tons of really fun resources.

Geography

I’ve ditched formal geography curriculum because I have so many fun geography activities. Plus, it’s included in the history. We have:

Geography Bingo
38 Which Way USA state packets
Which Way USA the Game
HL world geo series
Stack the Countries app
State Shape Rummy

Plus I think we have other things, too.

Music Appreciation

I’d like to finish this, but we have 4 months remaining. Also, last year, we were doing EVERY workbook page, EVERY test, EVERY piece of music and EVERY lapbook item. We may eliminate the workbook and just read, listen to some and lapbook.

That is tentatively what our third grade year will look like. We do have a whole list of other books that get wrapped up into tea time (ideally) each day.

Have you ever done an “easy” year? For you, them or both?