More On The Co-Op

This has been something I have dreamed about being a part of since I heard of a group from a homeschooling friend that attended one about an hour west of us. It is a group that has been going for several years and my friend was a big part of their success. Now that we lived further East, we thought, wouldn't it be nice to have something like that closer to home.

It took a while to find a venue. We eventually found a library willing to give us the community room for 2 hours, every other week. In turn, a librarian handles 15 minutes of reading (material related to the topics) and also puts together a table full of books for us to check out at the end of the session. It is a win-win situation. The libraries depend on funding from book circulation and we provide homeschooling families from surrounding communities to come in and check out a lot of books.

Since my friend had been involved in a co-op before, she knew what worked and what didn't so we put a lot of work early on into setting the tone for the group. There are rules, like participants must contribute to a session at some point by hosting it themselves. It is a co-op, after all, not a few moms trying to educate the masses. It isn't a drop-off service either and parents are required to attend and help out. More basic rules too, like being quiet during activities or not running around and distracting the group.

The kids range from about 3 years old up to 8 or 9. We try to gear the activities to a second/third grade level. There is usually something for everyone. Here is a sample outline of a previous session:

Topic: Solar System/Gravity

ARRIVAL TIME (greetings & set up)
1:00 – 1:15
Please ensure you are ready for the librarian to start at 1:15

READING CIRCLE TIME (Librarian)
1:15 – 1:35
Readings and circle activities based on the day's theme

SHOW AND TELL
1:35 - 1:50
Children can share their learning on the day's topic with the rest of the
group(this is a voluntary part of the program)

GROUP TIME
1:50 – 3:00
For this session there will not be centres and all activities will be run as a
whole group.

We will be doing a number of different activities and experiments examining the
orbits of the planets, there relative sizes and discovering how they are
governed by Newton's laws of Motion.

We will be walking the orbit of the earth and discovering how the tilt of the
Earth on its axis effects the seasons/equinoxes. Using hands on activities and
experiments we will be exploring Newton's 3 Laws of Motion and how they relate to the planets in our solar system. [Example activities included making balls out of newspaper and attaching them to strings so the kids could whirl them around their heads to see how/why the pulling kept it in a circle rather than throwing it off into the room; and using magnets and ball bearings to see how one celestial body affected the movement of another.] We will examine how a combination of inertia and gravity keep the planets orbiting the sun. We will examine the sizes of the different planets and how that effect the amount of gravity they have. We will discover how gravity would effect our weight on each of the planets.

Clean-up and sign out library materials

It has been a great success and is something parents can be proud of while the kids just have fun learning together. We started with 4 families and now have a pretty solid core group of 9. We are averaging 20-24 kids lately and word of mouth has been spectacular. I see great things for this group. The only problem I see in the future is having too many people interested.