Homeschooling, Homeschmooling

I'm feeling the need to "empty" my brain and record all the homeschooling thoughts going through my mind this evening and do an update of sorts.  So, this might be boring.  Especially for those of you who are not homeschoolers.  Feel free to stop reading at any time.  This is one of those posts that is more for myself and my own journal...

This is normally the time of year when we should be winding down, finishing up things, looking ahead to being done.  I just read in someone's blog how they are doing just that and I am a little jealous.  That is not the case for us this year.  We actually aren't really ending at all, this is the first year we will truly school year round.  I've talked about doing it for years but never actually have.  Due to starting Hannah's main curriculum late and then taking a whole lot of time off at Christmas and again in January for the crazy road trip we have not completed our school year.   We have one more "normal" week before heading into about 2 months of busy.  My plan is to fit in school any day that we are home and it works out.  I figure we should probably get in about 3 days of school a week.  That's doable even in the summer with VBS's and such.  Joe is finally really cooperating with his school and he is usually done with his math and reading in about half an hour.  He is flying through everything I give him and twice last week actually did more than he had to.  This is such amazing progress!  At the beginning of the year my two goals for him were to learn to sit and do work for at least half an hour without freaking out and to be reading.  He is doing both and I couldn't be happier.  I have totally changed my approach to teaching  him to read and now he's very motivated and can't wait to do reading.  He is a total sight reader so I've just started doing flash cards with him and then we read a book.  I help  him with any words he doesn't already know and he works his way through a book.  I'm using books designed for early readers with a lot of repetition so he sees the same words over and over.  He and Grace have worked very well together.  We finished our study of Night Creatures and start an Evan Moor study of "Animals Without Backbones" tomorrow.  After this I'm thinking we will do "Animals With Backbones."  Sounds logical right?  Grace is also finally showing some real progress in learning to read.  I am no longer flipping out so I guess I am showing some progress too.  She is reading through an Abeka reader and is getting more fluent by the day.  I'm really proud of her.   She has worked very hard.  We were in a bookstore last week and she saw a very fat book that she really wants to read and that has motivated her.  It's called, "Warrior" and has a picture of a cat on it.  Does anyone know anything about this book?  Hannah is almost done with her math for the year and I was planning to go ahead and get the next book (we use Horizons) but she asked for a break from her regular math.  She has done two lessons a day all year so that she could finish early and so I'm giving her a break.  But--she will still have to do lots of arithmetic drills.  I'm going to get her just a general multiplication and division workbook.  She starts First Language Lessons Vol. 4 tomorrow.  We are technically a year behind in the FLL because I did some other curriculum for two years before going back to FLL.  So, we've doubled up all year on Vol. 3 and finished that a couple of weeks ago.  I think that about covers everybody and what we are up to at this point in our school year.  It's been tough balancing and juggling three very different learners but we're doing it.  Day by day by the grace of God~