The TJEd model identifies three foundational phases our kids move through during their home education: Core, Love of Learning, and Scholar.  You can reject the "phase" concept, but the underlying approach is fundamentally sound whatever your philosophy.  

1. Young children need to learn core value and a solid work ethic; until this is accomplished, academic pursuits are not significant.
2. Having a good start on core values, we need to inculcate a love of learning in our kids.  Here again, specific curriculum is less important than developing the lifetime learning culture in your home.  
3. Older kids who are ethically sound and hard working, and who moreover love to learn, will want to study.  These kids - starting between 12 - 14 - are ready to commit to a rigorous program and work long hours, and love doing it.  Especially if they have a sense of purpose - a reason to study.  

The lessons of Core Phase are:

1. Good and bad
2. True and false
3. Right and wrong

In most TJEd homes, these are Bible-based lessons; the Thomas Jefferson Home Companion offers a helpful list of narrative Bible selections to share and discuss with young children. Frankly, I shudder to imagine a world where everybody's axiomatic belief is, "the Bible is true.:" The lessons of early childhood are powerful. They profoundly affect your reasoning as an adult even if you've forgotten the content.

Reasoning is important. Competent adults can evaluate arguments and identify the illogical strings and metaphor-driven leaps. Sadly, few adults today have the critical thinking skills to follow a line of logic, much less dissect and evaluate it. So logic is an important part of our core study program.

We've attempted to use - loved and hated - a lot of logic curriculum in our house. In this article, I'll review what we've used for each WTM stage - Grammar (grades 1 - 4), Logic (grades 5 - 8), and Rhetoric (grades 9 - 12). Logic does not provide a complete Core study program; in a later post, I will also review ideas for studying philosophy with your kids, for several reasons:

• Studying philosophy at an early age gives children the oppportunity to do abstract thinking when they're ready, not when you expect it.
• Philosophy teaches kids to think about ethics - right and wrong - and epistemology - what we can know, and how we can know it. The ability to identify true and right does not develop in a vacuum. Especially in today's media- and propaganda-rich world, our kids need tools for reasoning clearly and choosing wisely.

Back to logic. It is not easy to find secular resources below college level, but it's easier than it used to be. As soon as kids can read comfortably - second or third grade - they can start doing logic. I like Bonnie Risby's series (see links below) for the elementary grades. They are fun, easy, and not too long. My daughter and I have a lot of fun with these books.

By 6th grade, students will have complete Bonnie Risby's series.  The best resource I know of for middle grade kids is from Critical Thinking Press.  Other logic books I've seen are too heavily Christian to even mention on this hub.  By the time kids are in 9th grade, they are ready for the standard college intro text by Irving Copi (assuming they've been studying logic all along).  

The titles below are not available on Amazon, and I've not used them, but they are popular and highly regarded. We will try these out for middle-school grades starting next year.