Third grade is different. I suspect the K, 1 and 2 stuff is just filler until they're really able to focus. At the beginning of third they're nibbling around the edges of arithmetic, filling space with telling time and measurement and counting blocks and stuff. IME a talented kid just whips through all that in a couple of months. In third it gets real, and by the end it looks like they've got all four operations down pat with a lot of memorisation of the facts (I think, I have one that's starting third and one just finished it). And once you have that there's a whole world of enrichment, codes and geometry and tricky word problems and postulates and theorems and stuff. It's like learning to read vs reading to learn.
