The ladies came up with way more ideas than I would ever have thought of. I had printed out copies of the schedule as we had made it in Spring, with blank spaces where we didn’t have teachers, helpers or topics.
Our big challenge was how to get two adults into each classroom when we were down to just 14 adults, and trying to run 7 classes. We knew historically that if we don’t leave two extra as substitute and "floor officer" we run out of people when flu season hits, and have to cancel the whole co-op. We use the church building for free, but their insurance insists on having two adults per classroom.
Also we are running an "Introduction to Homeschooling Methods" for the odles of panicked mothers of 4 year olds who phone me wanted to join the co-op, because their extended families are pressuring them to get the children into just the right pre-school or the little darlings will never get into college (!) This class will use up a teaching parent, add babies to the nursery and young children to the pre-k class, but not gain us any teaching parents, so this is logistically challenging when we are already low on available adults. But this is our response to the challenge of reaching out to new homeschooling families, without further re-enforcing the notion that all little kids are better off away from their families in preschool.
The co-op voted that our preschool class is primarily for the younger siblings of students, so they are in a safe place while older siblings do class, and a parent teaches, not as an introduction to formal group learning. Many of our members believe little kids are best off in family settings, not institutional settings; logistically, that class could take over the limited building space, and limited pool of available teaching parents as well. With Massachusetts investigating universal preschool, I feel like buying "Better Late Than Early" by the case loads to pass out, and I’ve never even read all of it, just skimmed it. We still want to extend a hand to the newbies though, who seem to think there must be one and only one way to do it that they can learn if they ask an expert – boy are they in for a surprise.
But we all remember that first year of figuring out where to start – there are HOW many ways to do this? Charlotte who? What’s Delight doing driving my learning? What do I do with the baby while we are doing school? How can I get my active boy to sit at a table? What do you mean he doesn’t have to? How do I file a letter of intent? Will social services knock on my door? What do I tell my extended family? What do I tell the Walmart clerk? Will my kids become weird? When will I ever get a break?
So, obviously, we want to run the class.
To conserve our teaching parents, we bundled grades quite a bit, and
The Jr and Sr High kids class will be the same for both hours, so they can get through the whole 12 week set up of their book; but it’s not such a hard topic that doubling up will burn them out (I hope). It’s one of the Bernie Zubrowski books, an introduction to density, but in Mr Zubrowski style, the title is "Salad Dressing Physics." Mary Pride and Debbie whats-her name who wrote the Ultimate guide to Homeschooling both recommend his books, they are available through the Pitsco catalog.
This next semester will look different than any of the others have in the last 5 years. We are meeting for 6 weeks in late Winter, so that the traveling on ice blues should be better, or at least we’ll be more used to them than right after Christmas. I sure didn’t come up with that idea, I thought 12 weeks or cancel was the deal. My baby is even due before we start up this year, but that doesn’t faze anybody. Wow! I’m despensable! This group must be healthy. Hooray!
It sounds like this co-op is a well-oiled machine! (At least, by homeschool standards!) Isn't it great when God helps us see what is critical and what is not?
Blessings in all this planning!
Annie