How far are you?

Well, I started with Touching Spirit Bear and am on Day 15 of the lesson plan. I feel like I'm not getting very far. We've skipped a lot of the writing activities and just had discussions instead. I don't have very many grades for the students, because we're reading most of the time. Is this how it is for everyone else, too? The one thing that is definitely working for us is that I took all of the vocab words from the lesson plans and made a spreadsheet for the kids to write the definitions on. We discuss the word and look at the context to determine the meaning. Sometimes we get the dictionary out. I only have 5 students, so it works. I did the same for literary terms, because that is a portion of our general ed English exam. If you want a copy of the spreadsheets, I'd be glad to e-mail them to you, just let me know.