Week 2: Starting Back to Co-op

It's Wednesday. That means co-op for us. It's a great day for the kids to look forward to a break from the regular grind and gives them accountability and an opportunity for them to interact with other students and the material they've been studying.

Today was our first week of 27 that are planned for the whole school year.

It looked something like this:

From 9:30-10:45 the younger (upper grammar age) girls did art using Artistic Pursuits as their base curriculum.

Learning to find the outside edge of an object in drawing.

The rhetoric level students reviewed their first chapter in Apologia Biology and did their lab.

The pros and cons of home education...you get to stay home, but the cat helps.

Identifying the parts of a cell

At 11:00 the younger girls started their science discussion and lab from Apologia's Flying Creatures book. 

Test flying gliders of different wing-lengths

Then we took a nice break, ate lunch together and headed over to our friends' house for Tapestry co-op. This is the first major location shift we've had in a while as we've always had it at our house, but we've decided to move this year so babies and toddlers and little siblings can nap and play and not be disturbed. It worked out great!

History discussion

I was a little nervous coming into today. We had not had co-op for most of last school year, and when we did decide that it would be better to have some kind of group work three students of our regular group was missing, and it was only for writing and lower-grammar stuff. We had not really tackled the main Tapestry of Grace topics for over a year together, and there have been changes in all the kids over the last year. We went from a group of early middle-schoolers to high-schoolers, and we're now working with the material on a higher level. When we sat down to discussion, however, I was gratified to see how hard everyone had worked on the assignments that they had been given, how well they understood the material, and how well they could discuss it and synthesize the information. My job was very easy. We covered everything from the founding of Jamestown, the 30 Years' War, to Don Quixote and literary terminology pertaining to it. 

I'm so proud of the kids and all their hard work, and can't wait until next week to do it all over again!