Well, my kid is 6, so I don't know how much my opinion will help you, but we really did not enjoy the format of Phonics Pathways. I do use it as a guide still, just in an attempt to get my money's worth out of it, but if we were doing it the way you're "supposed" to, it would be incredibly irritating to both of us.
So what we do with the PP book is flip through and pick a phonics "family" that she's not familiar with or I've noticed that she has trouble with, then I have her read the full words or the sentences--she doesn't like how the mulit-syllabic words are broken up by hyphens, and we both dislike having to sound out every part of each word 3 or 4 times.
For reading, we have "devolved" into "just reading" from books *shrug*. Also, we'll sometimes look through PP and find a word family to build our own stapled-together "reader", that way we're using the book as a resource but not stuck in it's doldrums of repetitiveness. Or I write out sentences for her to read out loud using words from PP.
You said that your older child needs a little extra help with spelling and grammar; if that is the case and it's not that she needs remedial phonics work, then I would choose another resource besides Phonics Pathways---like All About Spelling or Sequential Spelling along with that . . . Master detective? what's it called, oh, Editor in Chief series for grammar/sentence structure (or something similar). For my firstie next year, we're doing "Grammar Land" along with 3D grammar symbols that we'll use just a little at a time to label the noun/verb etc. in mom-written sentences.
JMO I really don't like PP, lol. I know other people have had great success with it. For me, no. I'd rather be sitting through . . . a Macroeconomics final whilst listening to a sonata in fingernails on a chalkboard. That's how unbearable I find it
