Hi. I will have 3rd and 5th grade boys next year, and it will be our first year homeschooling. I think we’ll use Essentials in Writing which will cover grammar and writing. And I’m thinking Spelling You See for spelling and handwriting. Should I use a formal reading curriculum such as BJU reading? Any other subjects that fall under language arts that I’m overlooking? (Vocab?)
I’ll also have a kindergartener but will be starting him out with AAR.
You could add literature units that would cover comprehension and vocabulary. We use the literature units from this website for my 3rd grader. Memoria press has good literature units too.
For reading, we use Abeka Think & Learn Skillsheets starting in grade 3 once a week. It’s a short passage and then there are questions about it. They say to time the kids, but we don’t time. I’m looking for comprehension and accuracy at this point. I also have a book list I come up with for each grade and they read the 10 books or whatever it is throughout the year. This way, weekly I check accuracy, but the rest of the time, I am just glad they’re reading and enjoying it. My goal is to have them enjoy reading, and I have found programs don’t facilitate that. (A bonus of my method of picking book lists for the year is that I can choose ones that interest each kid, and they don’t have to be the same books. So, they generally do enjoy reading. Sometimes we do a project for the books too, so I can see what they get out of the books by how the project is.)
If they are both beyond AAR 4, this article has a lot of ideas on what you can do next: https://blog.allaboutlearningpress.com/after-all-about-reading/
We enjoyed Sonlight readers a lot here.
This year we are using BJU Reading, my boys (3rd and 5th) like it. Next year we will be doing more of a Literature based curriculum. I think it depends on the child…my boys love reading so I think they will enjoy the change.