we had a smooth transition but the fluency sheets are longer and there are practice sheets before the stories so we usually do 3 days for regular lessons (1 lesson, 2 fluency sheet) and 2 days for story based lessons (1 for practice sheet, 1 for reading story since they are longer) Mine is a struggling reader (just turned 7) though

I write WWE 1:2 (week 1 lesson 2)

Exploration Education Physical Science is all in once-it's taught on the computer, comes with a logbook and all necessary experiment supplies-it would be great for your older kids and is pretty independent.

It's not very cheap but it could totally be worth it: Exploration Education Physical Science. I just bought it for my advanced 8 year old and I sit near him while he's doing it but it's essentially hands off. There is an online text with built in quizzes, a log book to record answers to the quizzes and daily experiments/activities. Best part----> it comes with a box of everything you need for experiments! The only thing I had to buy was a low heat glue gun for my son to use (again he's 8 so I supervise to make sure he is being safe but yours are older than mine) I'd really recommend it so far, it's taking him about 20-40 minutes per day depending on the activity/experiment and just in the first week he built his own electric race car! Super fun!

I'm not a huge help but my first inclination would be to make him sit where he is until his work is done (with reasonable breaks.) My 7 year old will fuss and whine and make excuses as long as I let him most days but today I told him he could sit where he was until the work I asked for was done and after 40 minutes or so of fit throwing (tearing up his copywork, etc) he did it and we were good. Have you tried that?

I'll do that, all three of mine have been in Speech before (two still) and I needed vision therapy as a kid for extreme myopia and astigmatism, it never occured to me about that! Their speech therapist has OT at the ame office, I'll see about getting an evaluation!

yes they are both very good at tanagrams (we actually do those a lot around here!)

A little background: this was our first year homeschooling my 3rd and 1st graders, they were previously in a charter school. My 3rd grader was accelerated and skipped 1st grade, partly due to that his handwriting deteriorated over his 2nd grade year just due to the quanitity of writing he was doing and poor motor skills. My 1st grader also had awful handwriting when we started. I reduced most writing assignments when we started last year and did HWT to remediate the writing (older son doing cursive.) It helped a little with my older son-his printing improved but he still won't write cursive unless doing a specific cursive exercise. My younger son can do neater handwriting but again unless he's actually doing a handwriting workbook it's awful. (And he doesn't want to writing on normal notebook paper.) He just asked to learn cursive too so now both boys are starting with MP American Cursive...the approach seems better for me. All that to say I asked my boys to do a little fill-in-the-blank worksheet for my husband for Father's Day today and I wanted to cry when they gave it to me. It was awful. Barely legible, words totally skipped and I am feeling like I'm failing them with this part of our schooling. I just started CAP W&R and MCT Grammar Island with my older a couple of weeks ago to help (his test scores for LA were pretty bad this year) but the actual handwriting itself is just so bad. Should I have them go back to more copywork? Tracing copywork or just copying themselves? If so, in cursive or print since they aren't proficient in cursive? And how harsh should I be in demanding proper writing? I appreciate any advice!

Two of my sons recieve therapy and have for years, it's covered through our insurance so I don't know if that's an option for you. Other than that for home work we use an app called "Oral Motor" to use exercises to help strengthen the muscles for the sounds they are weak in. There's also one called Phonics Studio that helps my older son practice sounds. I also like a blog called mommyspeechtherapy.com for learning more

This was our first year homeschooling (1st and 3rd grade boys) and I started off with MM because of the price. My boys hated it. I admit I printed it off in B&W and it was just a downer of our day. My advanced 3rd grader would reluctantly do it but there was no enjoyment there (and he's a math kindof kid.) My struggling 1st grader fought me tooth and nail over it and finally I went over to Singapore and I have no regrets at all. The Singapore is more expensive but the color and illustrations in the text are very engaging for my younger boy and the white space like mentioned above helps them to not feel overwhelmed when working. I will reuse the texts for all my boys so don't mind investing in them. I love the HIG too, it really gives lots of multisensory approaches to help them learn.

I learned French casually in preschool/daycare around age 5. Later in public school I took Spanish for 3 years, then another 3 years of French and had no problem learning both. When I married my husband and we moved to italy it was again very easy to pick up Italian. I don't think there's any detriment to learning similar languages. Any kind of language exposure when they are young is helpful for helping pick up the nuances of the language later as well...my French teacher always told me I had a very good accent and I credit that to the early exposure. (My Spanish accent was not so great!)

I started my struggling reader on AAS at the beginning of 1st and he did surprisingly well at it. We did AAR1 too this year and it helped a ton with the reading. I think the phonics in AAS could help with the reading process...might be worth it to try it at a slow pace and see how he responds.

We started Song School Latin last year for my 3rd and 1st graders and they love it...we listen to it in the car all the time, and they think the DVD is hilarious. I just ordered CAP Spanish for Children for my rising 4th grader and also bought the Song School Spanish CD to listen to in the car for the younger ones and because I thought they'd think the songs in the dual languages would be funny :)

I started my 3rd grader on it this year and he did 2 levels in about 9 months, my first grader went through level 1 in that same amount of time. I just ordered as we went along.

I would look at All About Reading. My son was the exact same after K and this was our first year homeschooling. The systematic and multisensory approach of AAR was really appealing to him and he excelled with it. It literally saved us this year.