Little Bits of Life: Grade 3 Lightning Lit Set Review

I have a 3rd grader this year. She loves to read and I thought Grade 3 Lightning Lit Set from Hewitt Homeschooling might be a perfect fit for her. This set comes with a teacher’s guide and a student book. But you will be required to buy some additional books to use the curriculum. This curriculum requires 8 additional books. I already had a couple of the books on hand since my oldest red them last year. The others I could find on the digital library that our local library offers. This helped to cut cost and we can check them out for 21 days so its plenty of time for her to read them before they must be returned. None of the books are all that expensive so I felt it was still affordable even if I were to have to buy all 8 books for her to read.

Lightning Literature & Composition
Grade 3 Pack w Book of Poetry

I like how the teacher’s guide is set up. It's set up day by day and lays out what chapters or pages your child is to read each day and tells what work pages they are to complete in the student book. It also includes the comprehension questions for the reading and the answers. It has the instructions for the weekly composition assignments and all the answers to the student guide. It even has some extra bonus activities you can you do if you feel you need a little extra. The time it takes to complete each day’s lesson will mostly depend on your child’s reading skills. My daughter spends about an hour on each day’s lesson. This includes the time to read the assignment and do the workbook pages for the day.

The student guide is a consumable book that comes in color. My girls enjoyed that it had color. I consider this a complete language arts course because it includes instruction on grammar as well as reading comp a reading journal, dictionary pages, sentence puzzles etc. It uses sentence diagramming, so if you are not familiar with it you might want to read up on it to see if it is a good fit for you.

Each book that your child reads runs for 2 weeks or more. You can get a full school year out of it doing the daily lessons. The books are all age and grade appropriate. The books used in this program are: Sarah, Plain and Tall, Rickshaw Girl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ramona and Her Father, Charlotte’s Wed, The Wheel on the School, The Tale of Despereaux, and the Random House book of Poetry for Children. My daughter was excited about all the books in the selection except for the Random House Book of Poetry. So far this is not a big hit with her but she is tolerating it. Mostly because the poetry lessons are shorter than the regular lessons. Poetry is just not her thing and that is ok. Most of you have probably already read some of these books when you were a kid so I won’t waste your time by telling you about each book. I was impressed with the comprehension question that followed each lesson and I felt that they did a great job helping me to see what she understood each time she completed a chapter. The questions gave her pause and she always put some thought into it before she answered each question.

My daughter did like that this curriculum covered both Lit and grammar. Having everything in one book was a plus for her. She was a little intimidated about the sentence diagramming and so was I. I had to read the teacher’s guide quite a bit to help her with the diagramming. It was just not something I learned how to do when I was in school. All the lines were a little confusing for the both of us. We struggled with it at first but I do think we are getting a better handle on it the more we have worked with diagramming. She liked the explanations given on each grammar page though. It gave a simple explanation of what each part of speech was at the beginning of the assignment. Each lesson built on the next with some great lit lessons thrown in the mix.

Over all I am satisfied with Grade 3 Lightning Lit Set it has great books that she is enjoying and the grammar lessons are working for her. Check out the link below if you would like to read about other grade levels and products offered by Hewitt Homeschooling.