Spring Homeschool Co-op

We've been participating in our homeschool co-op for 7 years now.  It is an activity the children truly look forward to and benefit from immensely.  Our group is usually divided into four smaller age groups, plus the nursery.  We always have plenty of babes in arms and a well staffed nursery of moms, but we are also welcome to bring our younger children into our classroom as needed. Unless I am in the nursery, and I try very hard to avoid being so, my youngest set is nearly always with me. This spring we have some great classes planned for the children, and as I have spent many hours online looking for co-op class ideas over the years, I thought I'd post our ideas here for others benefit.

Our nursery moms have planned on teaching a little music and a little sign language to the toddlers.  If they don't have just a touch of planned activity the children tend to go a little feral. As the weather warms up, the children will be able to go outside.

The next age group are our K through 2nd graders.  Their classes will be astronomy, the 5 in a Row literature series, and a class in sign language in which they will learn to sign the words from several short story books including Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle.

The 3rd through 5th grade will also be studying astronomy taught by yours truly.  I'm hoping to include hands on projects each week.  Today I'll be displaying a to scale model of the sun and planets to show the vast difference in solar and planetary size and the children will be making their own to scale model showing the relative difference in distances of planets from the sun. This group will also have an art class and a class in 19th century baseball.  My kids are especially intrigued by the baseball class.  Rumor has it that our teacher is bringing in a 19th century baseball player re-enactor to the class and the children will play a game using 19th century rules at the end of the semester.

The 6th-8th grade will have classes in Shakespearean drama(don't tell my kids, they don't know yet), Physics Quest, and introductory photography taught by me.  This will be my third time around teaching photography and this group has been begging for this class for a couple of years now.  I'm not a trained photographer so this is usually a great learning experience for me as well as the students and it is always entertaining to see what they find interesting enough to photograph.

The High School class will be taking a second semester of Church History.  This class is for credit for many of the children in a local homeschool umbrella group so it is much more involved than any co-op class we have ever had.  Karate Kid really enjoys this class and even likes doing the homework assignments.  The teacher for this class has a wonderful knack for engaging the teenagers and drawing them into the rich history of the church.  Their second class will be a drawing class that they will be able to pair with the photography class from last semester for a 1/2 Fine Arts credit.