What's working

I just finished the quarterly report required in New York State and so this seems like a good time to review and see what is working. Surprisingly, quite a lot. There has been significant tweaking done since this post but not as much as some years.
The self propelled Bible study never got off the ground and the twins are working through Bible History by Johnson,Hannan,and Dominica and Ken is reading The New Catholic Picture Bible. The rest of the religion outline is working although we are behind with The Adventure of the Amethyst. The boys love this book and sit rapt every morning as I read aloud the further adventures of the Lovell children. Today the older three were baptized. (the youngest was baptized earlier during an illness). Tomorrow--First Holy Communion. As converts ourselves this book really hits home and also the children ask the real questions of their friend the Bishop that my boys would ask. Is it a sin to spit in your brother's bath water? Are all Christians Catholic? Is there any salvation outside of the Church and what is hell really like? (Tough one). This book is great and we are loving it.
Latin is going well and I have resisted tweaking here. We are on lesson 16 of Latina Christiana (second conjugation!). Lingua Mater didn't make it though. The twins just aren't ready for a composition course yet. Instead we are working through the writing part of Voyages in English 7. Today they gave talks they had written on how to tie knots. For some reason I can't fathom they are not giving me any grief about this. We are also continuing Poetry Monday (copying of poetry into a lesson book, memorization optional)Ocular Athletic Thursday, and narration Friday (they are narrating The Trojan War and Adventures of Odysseus by Padric Collum--even Ken). Spelling is going amazingly well with the Seton workbooks and awhile back the boys declared spelling their favorite subject. I guess that fit I pitched was for nothing.
Math was switched to Saxon 7/6 as less confusing and time consumming. Ken is reviewing 3rd grade math with the new Seton Math 3. He likes that book so much he has been seen to pat it. I think it is the art work but he likes that it only does one thing a day. I didn't realize that the Saxon method of doing several math topics a day was confusing him. String, Staightedge and Shadow is going well and we read from it once a week.
History has completely changed. The Old World and America just didn't cut it here and we are now using The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer. This is really sticking--Joe aced all the ancient history on Jeapordy a couple of nights ago. Okay, it was teen Jeapardy but still, he's only twelve!
So, thanks mostly to Seton workbooks (I can't believe I'm typing this!)this year is going very well and another benefit has been that after this week's stomach bug everything just fell back into routine. There was a routine to fall back into!