Year End Curriculum Review | Kindergarten, First, and Third Grade

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My last end-of-year curriculum review ended up being more helpful than I had imagined. Many of you appreciated it (I’m so glad!), but it was quite helpful to me in moving forward with this year’s plans. That’s not to say that this year didn’t have its flops, but as a whole, we enjoyed and stuck with most of the curriculum we started out with. There were a few exceptions though. You can read about why I chose these curricula in my picks post for kindergarten and first grade here, and third grade here. In this post, I’ll go over why we enjoyed each curriculum, what ended up not working, and why.

Let’s start our curriculum review with our group subjects!

Morning basket continues to be our favorite time of day (read some of my favorite morning basket tips for success here). A few months in we took a break from our One Year Bible and jumped into Who Is Jesus. This might have been my favorite devotional we’ve ever done with the kids. Serious meat-and-potatoes content and such awesome discussion questions. I highly recommend it!

Next, we worked our way through the Old Testament volume of The Kingdom of God Bible Storybook from Litho Kids. The kids loved the pictures and the discussion questions were very helpful. Every once in a while I wished they had gone a little more in-depth with the story. For example, they left out Balaam’s talking donkey! Not integral to the overall theme of pointing to Christ, but a favorite of mine, so I noticed. Overall I was very happy with the content and age-appropriate explanations. We’re looking forward to working through the New Testament volume.

Our New City Catechism is still going strong. This one will be a constant for some time. This year we added a solid number of newly memorized questions. Squeaks even memorized the complete Apostles’ Creed (I made her a helpful tool), and Little Dude is only a few lines away too!

Story of the World continues to rock our socks off, and using it strictly as a read-aloud is working perfectly for us. History is so fun! We finished volume one, The Ancient World, and are about halfway through volume two, The Middle Ages. The chapters are short and the language is easy to understand. Even almost six-year-old Flash is retaining a lot of the information. There have been a few times we stopped to follow rabbit trails for a while (Vikings and Knights, most recently) and it’s super easy to just pick up reading again where we left off.

A few other topics have been mixed into our morning basket routine in an effort to streamline and cover as much together as a group as we can.

I created our new morning menus to cover calendar work, life skills like address and phone number memorization, as well as weather tracking, copy work, and even space for hymn study (should we ever decide to dive back in). I also added my skip counting cards back into the mix to be sure the boys were getting solid foundations since it was so helpful to Squeaks when she started multiplication and division this year.

Finally, I ended up pausing Prima Latina Latin with Squeaks about mid-way through the year and I’m attempting to work Latin into our mornings together. It occurred to me (I wish sooner) that Squeaks was going to be quite a bit ahead of the boys. I’m still set on all three kiddos learning Latin. So I transitioned to reading questions and reviewing flashcards for a few minutes with all the kids each morning. It has slowed progress down significantly, but they’re loving it. Latin isn’t really a sprint anyway. We’re in it for the long haul. So obviously Prima Latina will follow us into the next school year as we aren’t even close to finished, and I’m totally fine with that.

Moving on to Flash’s Kindergarten curriculum review.

Simple. My Kindergarten Journal was a great fit. I’m not surprised seeing as I created it with my family in mind. It always makes me so happy to hear how much so many of you have enjoyed it as well! Flash has done sporadic bursts of journal pages all year, taking days or even weeks off, then wanting to do multiple pages and activities at once. I’m following his lead as I did with Little Dude and it’s working for us! Occasionally he’ll pull out an activity from his busy binder, and of course, he’s also in on all of our morning basket activities too, so he’s livin’ his best homeschool life.

The ABC See, Hear, Do books come out occasionally but he didn’t respond to them the same way Little Dude did. I’m definitely gonna keep them around though and the matching CVC flashcards I got to match will come in handy soon.

Little Dude has done great this year working through his “big kid” curriculum!

Horizons level 1 math was a perfect fit for Little Dude this year. He did a page or two a day. It’s super straight forward and easy for him to understand. He is very math minded and it was a fun confidence boost for him to finish his pages each day.

All About Reading was the real win for Little Dude this year though. This program is so comprehensive, has a wide variety of activities, and is super easy to modify to fit Little Dude’s learning pace. Reading is his least favorite subject and it took a lot of perseverance and self-control for him to work through these lessons. All About Reading was perfect though. If we had to do a dry, workbook based, repetitive curriculum we both would have lost our minds. I was able to break up individual lessons into 2-3 days and work through them slowly. Each day was a different activity or reading page so, while it was challenging, Little Dude still made amazing progress. Reading wasn’t just reading for us this year. It was character building as well (for me too) and I’m proud of his hard work!

The one flop for LD was Handwriting Without Tears. I think we did five pages and I could tell right away it just wasn’t a necessary focus for us. His penmanship improved just with daily activity, and reading was far more important to me than how neatly he can write. Just not a priority for us this year. I’m sure the curriculum is fine, we just dropped it too fast to even give a solid opinion.

Last but not least, a curriculum review for my sweet third grade girl!

Teaching Textbooks was the star of the show for Squeaks third grade year. I handed it to her and she took off so fast with it that she finished her third grade math a solid five weeks ahead of schedule. She loved the independence, the ability to customize certain features to her personality, using her Apple Pencil (big girl!), and even the cute “stickers” she collected for correct answers. Occasionally she’d come across a question she needed help with, so she’d bring it to me and we’d work through it together. Overall she was completely in control. While she worked, I was able to use the time to work with her brothers. So it was a blessing to all of us!

I know First Language Lessons isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but it was a great fit for us. Squeaks and I both appreciate the structured style and really enjoyed learning to diagram sentences this year (and I’m not being sarcastic). It’s a script style curriculum so I literally have zero prep, don’t have to know a thing about the topic, and can read straight from the book as we work together. The lessons are very reasonable in length. Squeaks especially enjoyed the added poetry and the letter writing unit.

Squeaks did great with her first cursive book and I ended up even needing to create a volume two since she finished my first book so quickly (read some benefits of teaching cursive here). She got even more writing practice with her yearly journal as well (a freebie I offer the newsletter subscribers). She’s had a journal every school year and it’s so fun to look back at how her writing has changed and improved.

Sewing, piano, and typing were extracurricular for us this year and Squeaks loved them all.

We used Touch-Type Read and Spell for typing and Squeaks was thrilled to get the chance to use mom’s computer. She made great progress even just doing 3-4 lessons a week. I loved that it wasn’t game based, doubled as spelling practice, and could be done independently. She mostly did the beginner modules but also enjoyed the subject based lessons. Typing out animal facts and art related sentences were her favorites. She also enjoyed the free typing option.

Hoffman Academy has been great for piano. Another independent activity that Squeaks has really loved and taken a lot of pride in. Watching her eagerly show off her talents to everyone who enters our home has been a blast. She loves the simple short lessons, the added games, and the cute little puppet shows at the end of each video. It’s great that she can pause, rewind, and even go back to completed lessons anytime she wants.

This was Squeaks third year doing sewing lessons! My mom generously comes over once a week and she and Squeaks have worked through quite a few patterns this year. This is an awesome life skill and Squeaks has a fantastic head start. She put her talents to work this past Christmas sewing custom bags and stuffed animals for several family members.

The biggest overall bust this year was science.

And now for a not-so-positive curriculum review. I don’t know what it is about science but it’s definitely my Achilles heel. I just cannot seem to stick with a curriculum. Master Books God’s Design for Life ended up being way too complex for Squeaks. There seems to be a huge jump between the beginner series and this one and we just weren’t ready for it. Even if it hadn’t been so advanced, I’m not sure it would have been a good fit. The reading was dry and frankly a bit boring, although to be fair I’ve never been a big science lover.

Faith and Science with Dr. Fizzlebop was a super cute book and I so wish it had worked out for us. I just couldn’t get into a good rhythm with it and collecting all the supplies for each experiment just didn’t happen. The handful of experiments we did do were super cute and fun though, so I’ll for sure be holding on to this book, even if it’s only a supplement in the future.

For a brief second I tried to work in The Human Anatomy study from The Waldock Way. Another great curriculum that I just couldn’t get to stick. I really loved the linked videos, activity pages, and booklists. Again, saving this one for when I can get my act together a bit better.

It just wasn’t our year for structured science. However, we did plant a family garden. Squeaks wrote a book (a literal huge book) filled with bird drawings and fun facts about each species. The boys spent hours “experimenting” in the back yard. Mud. All the mud. So kids still find a way to learn! Science is life at this age, and I’m just gonna keep tellin’ myself that.

All together, I think it was a very successful school year, and I’m very happy with the progress we made.

Doing an end-of-year curriculum review is so helpful as I plan the next school year. The majority of our curriculum picks were hits and I look forward to what the next school year will bring!

Do you do a year end curriculum review in your homeschool? What was your favorite curriculum pick of the year?