Friday was our first day at our new homeschooling co-op and it was a ton of fun! Reilly got to take a class about art as her Enrichment Class (EC), as well as a PE class. In PE, they're getting ready for the Presidential Fitness Challenge, so she had to do probably WAY more physical activity than she's done...well, ever. Running, jumping jacks, push ups...it was all very intense. I heard the male gym teacher telling one class how to do real push ups and I was surprised. I didn't know there was such a science to it! (You can read about the Challenge here if you want to.) Next week she'll run a mile, so I'm interested to see how that goes. Seeing as how her physical activity is limited to playing outside and going to karate once a week, they may have to weather a lot of whining! BUT, I guess I shouldn't underestimate the power of peer pressure.
Some of the other Enrichment Classes that she'll be taking this year are oceanography, the history of our state, science experiments, animal classification (I'm teaching that one!), science experiments, famous explorers, and something called "Simple Machine's with K'Nex". In PE, she'll be doing soccer, flag football, karate (Hey! She'll have an edge there!), four-square tournament, and some others that I can't remember off the top of my head. The only thing that I'm concerned about is that the lady that is in charge of PE is really nice, but she's one of those super-competitive fitness people who think that the world revolves around sports. Reilly has already said, "The gym teacher yells! A lot!" and I'm a bit worried that the teacher will go overboard with her...enthusiasm. I'm all for the kids being cheered on and encouraged to do their best, but there's a fine line between that and getting on to them for not trying as hard as the teacher would try if she were playing flag football. (Of course, my opinion is a bit colored by the fact that I'm the Least Competitive Person Alive. I'm like the antitheses of Tina, the gym teacher!)
I am one of the teachers in Declan's class, so I've got the "easy" job of shepherding the 3 and 4-year-olds. It was fun, if a little tiring. Luckily there are only 8 of them, and there are 3 teachers, so we've got 'em good and outnumbered!
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I'm glad you are all so pleased with the co-op. We still haven't done ours. Our homeschool association has two, one at the college, which is very close to our house. We just haven't done it yet for a few reasons, one being that my kids are still too fresh out of the public school to want to do the classroom thing again. Another reason is that it only last 2 1/2 months, which means that I would still have to plan 6 months or so of whatever class they chose to take....does that make sense? I just haven't found a way to make any of it work for us.
Does your co-op last the entire school year, or is it just a few months at a time like ours?
I won't say that we will never do ours, but none of us are feeling pulled to it yet.
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