Nine kids and me-a homeschool co-op tale.
Yesterday I hosted our first homeschool co-op of the academic year. There are four families and nine kids between us, aged 4-11. Planning a 3-hour lesson/event to accommodate such a wide range of ages presented some challenges, understandably.
I’m finding I have to rewrite my internal script, though. Although grouping kids by age is particularly effective for core subjects like math and language arts, it isn’t necessary for ALL subjects.
We parents decided that this co-op would focus primarily on enrichment and fun. Science, music, physical education, art, etc. We each teach the core subjects as families Monday-Thursday so we can have fun on Fridays.
This Friday “fun” day I taught “All About Water”. I kicked it off with a demonstration on clouds/precipitation, another on solubility and wrapped it up with a floating “m” experiment.
Then we split into pairs-an older kid with a younger kid-and did rotation stations.
One station required the kids to play music on glass vases. I gave them colored patterns to play and they had to guess which nursery rhyme it was. It was a hit.
Here are the worksheets I created to facilitate the activity:
At a second station, I taught them various watercolor techniques-crayon resist, salt technique, oil/water painting, and plastic wrap press.
A third station hosted a huge bin of water beads where they could search for the alphabet or complete a measuring activity. But mostly they just messed around with them. A pretty satisfying experience in and of itself, apparently.
The final station was a sink or float experiment. Pretty self-explanatory.
I printed out these labels with a column each for “sink” and “float”. Then the kids got to attach them to the correct column.
After that we broke for snacks and free play time while I blew up a bunch of water balloons for the grand finale-squirt gun races, a frozen t-shirt relay, and water balloon baseball.
I was lucky the weather cooperated-it shaped up to be crazy hot and the water play was a welcome reprieve. The whole experience probably appeared chaotic from a classroom standpoint but man it was fun.
Those kiddos were so stinkin’ glad to get together-which is something they would not be getting at public school anytime soon, sadly. I feel for everyone who is miffed about the woes of virtual learning and COVID in general, but me? I’m living it up on the homeschool front.