Another very happy homeschooler here. DD is 6, nominally in 2nd grade, and we've been homeschooling for about 4 months. She and I love the freedom to focus on whatever we want. Here's just one in-depth example:
We started on Story of the World, but I was unimpressed by the early chapters on prehistory. So I read her The Cartoon History of the World: The Stick and Stone Age, verbally supplemented by my own knowledge of human evolution. Then I started googling the neolithic revolution (agriculture, animal domestication, and, as a result, permanent cities) and created a quick powerpoint slide-show about Mehrgarh, precursor to the Indus Valley Civilization. You should have seen DD's eye's light up: "Is that for ME? You're making a lecture for ME?" I plan on doing the same for other first settlements in other parts of the world. (Note to self, what are the theories about why this started happening all over the world at around the same time? Is it an ice-age or end-of-ice-age thing? Must google . . .) Oh, and we're also reading The History of Money, the first two chapters deal with prehistory, so that ties in. Eventually we'll get back to Story of the World. Nobody's rushing us on a timeline.
And that's just history. We're also doing Science, Spanish, music, literature, and math. And amazingly, we're doing it all in just an hour or two a day. The rest of the time DD gets to run around like a crazy person. She goes to a "forest school" one day a week, and she has a ton of friends in the neighborhood (incl. one family of homeschoolers). I've noticed that the quality of her play has become deeper and richer. That could just be maturational, but it really feels like her mind has the freedom to breathe now.
