Yesterday I found a writing program that sounds like it will be just perfect for the kids. The book comes from a larger program called the Wordsmith Series. The first book in the series is called Wordsmith Apprentice. It is for 4th-6th grades. The idea is that the students should get their grammar from another program, but need a place to put it all together with a series of writing exercises that make use of the newly learned grammar. The kids have a good grammar program with Easy Grammar, but nothing really so good for writing.
This will be perfect for Kelly and I believe Christian should do well with it, too. The premise of the writing exercises is that the kids take the different parts of a newpaper staff: editor, reporter, writer, etc. They need to write everything for the newspaper including ad copy, want ads, letters, articles, etc. This should be super for the both of them. If it works well for them, there are two additional programs: Wordsmith for 7th-9th grades and Wordsmith Craftsman for 10th grade and up.
We are getting to the point now where the program is filling out with all the materials we need to cover. We still need to level out a little in terms of how we do our day to day scheduling, but that is a lot better than when we started and improving more and more every day. I have been hand writing their assignments for each day, but I think I will switch that over to the computer now that it is starting to stablize so that I can do the scheduling more quickly.