Creating a Co-op

Back in 1989, when we started to home school, co-ops were not a thing. In fact, home schooling was not really a thing, so we were pretty isolated. Isolation doesn’t feel good for anybody—not the parents and not the kids. It is a basic human need to feel connected to other people. We filled that need by networking with a few other families in our area who had recently started homeschooling as well. Most of that networking took the form of fieldtrips and outings of various kinds. This gave our children the chance to interact with other kids, and more importantly, gave us moms the chance to talk and not feel so alone. We enjoyed those weekly field trips and it filled an important role during those early home schooling years.

It was not many years into our journey that we found ourselves with much wider age gaps. I had children who were pre-school and early elementary ages along with my older children who were now junior high and beginning high school. Most of the families started home schooling with also had somewhat older children. We still did occasional outings, but it just was not the same. There was a definite void in terms of “connection” and my younger children seemed to be getting the short end of the stick.

When you are doing your best as a parent, doors often seem to open and answers seem to come when they are needed. The door that opened for us was “Thursday School.” There were not any families in my social group that had younger children and home schooled, but in the most amazing and unexpected ways I connected with four other families who had children in that target age group of 4-7 years old. Just to give you an idea of how random these connections were, one family lived in a city over the mountain a half hour east of us, but I met her at a seminar I attended. Another family lived a half hour south of us. We were introduced by a mutual friend. Another family lived on the other side of our town. I met her at a school board meeting. The fourth family conveniently moved into our neighborhood about this time. We started talking and decided that we would have all our children get together every Thursday for school.

We met at my house since I was the most centrally located and had a fairly large open space. Each mom picked a subject they wanted to teach and we spent three or four hours each Thursday rotating between the activity-based lessons that the moms had prepared. There was no structured curriculum plan. It was more of a “pot luck” type of experience, but it proved to be highly successful. The kids loved the activities and loved associating with other children. The moms thrived on the social connection. The quality of the lessons themselves proved to be outstanding. For me it was very motivating to prepare a lesson each week knowing that all the other moms were going to be watching and the whole group of kids would enjoy doing it. Perhaps it is a negative commentary on me, but I realized that I would never have put that level of preparation into a lesson for just a few of my children.

The benefits of “Thursday School” were many.

• It filled an important social need for both the children and moms.
• It gave the children experience cooperating in a group setting.
• It allowed us access to a wider variety of talents and personalities.
• It was personally very satisfying to focus on preparing one quality lesson and then receive the positive reinforcement for a job well done.
• It gave an increased sense of structure and predictability to our school week.
• It gave us a weekly emotional boast that carried us through the week.

Although our co-op evolved and changed over the years, it proved to be the foundation for a winning formula.