Orthodox Homeschooling 3rd / 4th grade - The Beginning of the 2026/2027 school year - Memoria Press Simply Classical Curriculum

So far the beginning of the 2026-2027 is off to a great start! Right how, my homeschool is working well as I make adjustments to my younger son's particular needs. I have set up our schedule so that I am giving each subject 30 minutes, with the exception of math which I am giving 1 hour. This gives us plenty of breathing room in the day to not feel rushed which is something my son and I really do not like to feel. We are doing a session of school from 10am to 12pm and 1pm to 3pm.

I am using two Memoria Press products with checklists and am using them "as written" and am "trusting the system." When it comes to the Simply Classical Bible Curriculum, I asked my son on Tuesday morning something like: "So your curriculum recommends we read the Bible story a second time today. Did you want to do that or should we just move on?" He said, "Sure, I'd like to read it again." It was then that I realized I need to trust the curriculum designed for children like my son. The next two days just had us memorizing a short Bible verse (that he memorized on the first day). And that's it. Tomorrow, we will review some more about the Lesson 1 Bible Story. Today, he said something like "I can tell this curriculum is made for [kids like me]. It is simple and fun and relaxing!" Something like that. I am accepting that using this curriculum is not about him making progress with his Bible knowledge all at once, but it is also about meeting other needs that he has.

With the 2 year Lesson Plans for Latina Cristiana, he is also getting a similar pacing with 2 weeks of the same words. While my son is really smart, his special needs create a need for familiarity, repetition, and small chunks of work at a time. Doing this slower place for Bible and Latin has been a great way to begin our "academic work" while he next does a traditional style curriculum for Math and English. I am not sure I will do more subjects from Memoria Press, but I am loving their Bible and Latin pacing and how well it works for my son!

You may have noticed, I have not mentioned Charlotte Mason on this page. While extremely popular among some circles, it is not a method we have ever used exclusively outside of copy-work, narration, and dictation, though I don't think these things are exclusive to Charlotte Mason's method either. I am raising two "twice-exceptional learners" that have both needed slightly different approaches to learning, but have been more of an electic homeschooler pulling from different sources. Another reason I couldn't use Charlotte Mason is my son was very sensitive to certain kinds of literature when he was younger and even cried at the Beatrix Potter stories, certainly a curriculum heavy in myths and fairy tales would certainly not have worked for us!