10 Best 3rd Grade Curriculum: A Complete Guide for Home & School

Whether your child is homeschooled or goes to school, logic-oriented or more on the creative side, you’ll find what you need here. The best third-grade curriculums that you can purchase today have been listed here. So, read on to find out!

Top 10 Third Grade Curriculum & Resources

1. Positive Action 3rd Grade Kit

This curriculum is originally a school curriculum, but it can easily be adjusted to be a homeschool one. In Unit 1, students meet the Galindos–a fun circus family that’ll teach kids about family support.

Then, Dr. Staywell joins them in Unit 2 and gives Sally health advice. Then, kids are taught about responsibility in Unit 3 with the help of a cowboy named Randy. Next, in Unit 4, they understand the value of friendship and how they can meet friends anywhere.

Afterward, Unit 5 introduces Betsy Bug to the kids, and she isn’t so keen on self-honesty. So, kids get a chance to analyze themselves honestly and learn how to own up to their mistakes. Last but not least, Unit 6 comes with a fictional story about a confident princess and an insecure dragon.

For 400$, you’d be getting 45 activity papers, three visual aids, nine posters, an instructor’s manual, and more!

2. Oak Meadow Third Grade Curriculum Package

Oak Meadow’s school and homeschool third-grade curriculum encourages creativity, imagination, and precision in students. The language arts program builds solid composition and grammar skills, while the social studies one introduces them to ancient cultures and religious beliefs with a dash of geography.

As for maths, kids learn about multiplication, addition, and subtractions in three-digit numbers. Not to mention, Oak Meadow gives a solid introduction to science. And kids learn about weather patterns, seasonal changes, and nature’s interdependence.

Additionally, the curriculum includes content about arts, music, crafts, and health. Kids learn about them through fun activities like coloring, cooking, carpentry, and more. Some projects encourage creativity and imagination like writing stories, playing maths games, crafting a tree collage, and memorizing poems.

If you purchase this curriculum, you should expect a coursebook, resource book, advanced recorder, handwriting book, cooking book, and seven stories.

3. Horizons 3rd Grade Complete Set

Horizons’ third-grade curriculum is often used as a homeschooling curriculum. And it creates an enjoyable spiral-based learning experience for kids. In addition, the lessons of this curriculum contain recurrent reviews that’ll allow your kids to transfer their basic skills into complex academic concepts quickly.

Moreover, this curriculum covers the subjects: phonics & reading, spelling & vocabulary, math, and health. And your child will enjoy a set of vibrant lessons and hands-on activities for each subject. In addition, two vividly illustrated readers join the kids for an enlightening phonics and reading course.

As a bonus point, this curriculum contains physical education and health electives, a Christian workbook curriculum, and bright illustrations that’ll catch your kids’ attention. Not to mention, it’s teacher-directed, so you won’t have a hard time teaching it to kids.

4. Time4Learning Third Grade Online Curriculum

Time4Learning’s third-grade curriculum can be used for online homeschooling, summer learning, and skill-building after school. It offers engaging lessons that encourage kids to enjoy the learning process. Also, kids get to practice their previously learned skills to further master subjects.

In addition, students will learn more about science, language arts, social studies, and maths in this curriculum. They’ll also get to practice their reading and writing skills more with the help of spelling lists and reading lists.

If you purchase this curriculum, you’ll enjoy automatic recordkeeping and grading, detailed lessons and activities planning, and an illustrative format to keep kids engaged.

Moreover, you’ll receive printable worksheets for your kids to better practice their lessons. But if your kid is more on the imaginative side, they’ll enjoy a bunch of gamified maths activities, as they’ll keep them thirsty for knowledge.

5. Master Books Grade 3 Basic 4 Subjects Set

The basic four subjects set introduced by Master Books will provide your kid with insight into the core subjects for the third grade. This bundle contains 36-weeks worth of material for both teachers and students. To elaborate, it includes maths, history, science, and language arts.

This Charlotte-Mason-based homeschool curriculum will introduce your kid to maths through hands-on activities, narration, and interactive stories. As for history, it tells the story of the United States of America from the start till the 1850s.

Moving on to language arts, students will learn more about writing paragraphs and mastering their observation and reading skills. Moreover, Master Books’ curriculum comes with an introduction about the bible that children will love.

Finally, kids will experience enjoyable activities that’ll teach them about the food chain, trees, climate, and much more. You should expect quizzes, worksheets, answer keys, schedules, and detailed instructions if you purchase this curriculum.

6. Abeka Grade 3 Child Kit

Abeka’s homeschool curriculum comes with a perfect chance for your kids to expand their horizons. To illustrate, the Grade 3 Child Kit contains all the required textbooks that your kid will need for an entire year, 24 items, to be specific. If combined with the Grade 3 Parent Kit, you’ll be giving your kid a solid introduction to academics and basic skills.

This curriculum will develop your kids’ reading, language, and spelling skills with enjoyable stories and exercises. As for penmanship, your third grader will be introduced to many Bible verses along with writing exercises.

In addition, Abeka’s curriculum will help your child master their math skills, including division and multiplication. And they’ll even learn more about fractions. As for history, your child will learn more about historical characters like Columbus and Martin Luther King. Finally, they’ll fall in love with science with a detailed introduction to weather, plants, and animals.

7. Moving Beyond the Page Curriculum Age 7-9

Moving Beyond the Page curriculum is the right choice if your kid has a wild imagination and immense creativity. The 7-9-year-olds curriculum will introduce your child to new topics in language arts, maths, social studies, and science.

For one, the language arts section has an engaging and interactive format with fascinating characters to excite your kids and indulge their imagination.

As for science and social studies, the curriculum provides interesting material that’ll introduce your kids to different topics through stories. For instance, if the subject is the weather, there’ll be a story about how the weather affects a lovely family.

When it comes to sound, the kids will learn about Helen Keller and her journey of coping with life without hearing. This way, they’ll appreciate their senses more. Otherwise, maths isn’t presented to kids as thematically as other subjects. Instead, it’s introduced to kids through a project-based format.

8. Blossom & Root Third Grade Curriculum Bundle

Blossom & Root provides a budget-friendly and secular-based curriculum for third graders. If you purchase this curriculum, your kids will learn basic math concepts, enjoy picture studies, and study an imaginative art curriculum with weekly projects to stimulate their creativity.

Moreover, the students will experience a vividly adventurous science curriculum that’ll introduce them to the wonders of the animal kingdom. Then, moving on to language arts, the kids will learn more about vocabulary, word building, narration, grammar, and journaling. And kids will learn more about geography.

Furthermore, this bundle contains a complete guide for parents along with detailed lessons, curriculum implementation tips, and supply lists. So, you won’t have a tough time planning your kids’ lessons. And the best part is that this curriculum requires only three hours of daily work, rendering it ideal for working and busy parents.

9. Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool Third Grade Curriculum

Easy Peasy All-in-One Curriculum provides an all-free and online curriculum for third-grade students. It introduces kids to the basic concepts of math, language arts, computer, and reading. And if you choose this curriculum, you’ll get to choose a theme that’ll enable your kids to study the same topics across various subjects.

In addition, the themes that you’ll choose from revolve around ancient history, geography, early American history, and modern history. And they come with a dash of art and music to feed your kids’ imagination. Also, the Easy Peasy curriculum is easy to deal with; your kid will merely follow the lesson’s link for each subject and go through the assignments.

Not to mention, the website will track your kid’s lessons and the days they were on, so you won’t have to go through the trouble of tracking them yourself. Also, you don’t have to worry about the website stealing any personal information because it doesn’t save it.

10. Power Homeschool 3rd Grade Program

Power Homeschool provides an interactive and exciting third-grade curriculum through engaging subject materials and informative video lessons. The following core subjects are included in this curriculum: language arts, reading, maths, social studies, and science.

In language arts and reading, third graders will work more on their writing, reading, and speaking skills. As for maths, kids develop their mathematical skills by learning more complex concepts about division, multiplication, fractions, and geometry.

Moving on to science, third graders get introduced to earth science and concepts like physics and space. There are also engaging experiments that act as a demonstration of what they’ve learned earlier. Also, kids will learn about governments, industries, and world history in social studies.

Moreover, this curriculum is easily accessible through an app called Acellus. Acellus is very easy to use, and it helps track school work and assignments for students.

What Is Taught in 3rd Grade - A Complete Guide

Reading

In third grade, the reading curriculum is nearly the same in all schools. Students are past the phase of learning how to read. Instead, they’re practicing reading to learn more about different topics.

Furthermore, kids are expected to read more books this year, preferably using new reading strategies, such as summarizing and asking questions.

By the end of the year, they should be able to write short stories with descriptions of characters, understand the presence of fiction in many different genres, and find out the main idea of any text.

Moreover, they should learn new vocabulary by using context hints, and they should be able to understand the different features in texts. Third graders should also know how to compare information from various non-fiction texts.

Maths

Third graders are expected to develop their multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction skills and use them to solve word problems and equations. In addition, they’re supposed to learn how to write numbers up to the hundred thousands and know the place value for every digit.

Moreover, students will learn more about decimals, how to write patterns and recognize them when needed, and how to compare fractions and form improper ones. By the end of the year, they should compare numbers and round them, know how to use number lines, and mentally add and subtract numbers.

Not to mention, children will also learn more about four-digit numbers, and they’ll grasp the concept of time and minutes. Regarding geometry, they’ll learn more about two-dimensional shapes and their areas and perimeters.

Social Studies

While the social studies curriculum largely depends on the school or the curriculum you choose for your kid, they’ll probably learn about native Americans and their history. Also, some curriculums contain the whole United States of America’s history from the ancient ages through the modern era.

Moreover, third graders might learn about some iconic historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Martin Luther King. Overall, they’ll get a hint about world history and governments in an enlightening yet straightforward manner. Finally, they’ll get introduced to many economic concepts like supply and demand and how to deal with money.

In addition, this year will inform the kids more about communities and elections and how officials in essential roles are chosen. Regarding geography, students get a simple introduction to maps, and they learn more about weather patterns and seasonal changes.

Science

Third grade is the year where science gets real for kids. Students learn about hypotheses and observation by seeing live hands-on scientific experiments. This makes for a smooth transition from theoretical to practical science by introducing them to more measurements and experimentations.

Like the social studies curriculum, science may differ from one school to another. But that third graders will likely learn more about the complex animal and plant kingdoms and how to classify them.

In addition, kids will focus a great deal on planet earth and the solar system, the states of matter, and the marvels of the human body. Also, some curriculums divide the science course into three domains that are studied throughout the year: physics, earth science and astronomy, and life science.

This classification benefits kids because they get accustomed to science being studied separately as in high school and later years.

Writing

When students finally reach the third grade, they get to use the writing foundation skills that they’ve worked hard to learn in the previous years. In addition, as they finish third grade, they should be able to organize their ideas before proceeding to write; they do this through planning and using thinking maps.

In addition, they’ll learn how to write letters, short stories, personal narratives, and research reports. To write those successfully, they’ll first get taught how to use the dictionary and the thesaurus as a reference.

Consequently, they’ll be able to use different types of speech, such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives in paragraphs. As a plus, they’ll also learn how to write in cursive and use transition words. Moreover, third graders will be introduced to more punctuation rules, and they’ll learn how to use them correctly.

Final Words

Third grade is the year where students begin to use the skills that they’ve gained in previous grades practically and theoretically. Therefore, it’s essential to choose an appropriate curriculum to meet their needs.

Your best option is the Positive Action 3rd Grade Kit because it can be used as both a school and homeschool curriculum. In addition, it introduces kids to visually appealing characters that let their imagination run wild.