My first article’s up at CatholicMom.com – Yay!. Go read. Natural follow-on to Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur’s column on How to Homeschool your Preschool Child, which you can treat as a pre-req. I think people run into trouble by thinking “1st grade” = “High School Lite”, when really it’s more like the final glorious days of preschool in all their imaginative, bigger-than-life power.
Jon & I noticed the other night that several of our kids have gone through a Terribly Tired phase right around six. So if your junior hiker has just announced, “I was not made for walking”, take a deep breath and just work around it for a couple years. Sometime in the sevens the big-kid-legs seem to show up, and the stamina returns.
BTW, Lisa Hendey has a nice collection of homeschool links on her homeschooling page. Worth a look and maybe a bookmark.