School Daze: Co-op

I realized I haven't blogged as much as I used to.... but it's not from lack of activity here.  (Maybe it's because of too much activity?)  Our days have been quite full, primarily full of SCHOOL.  So, I thought I'd do a little mini-series on what our school days have been like this year.

We've been meeting with our "Engage" school co-op again this year on Tuesdays, and it has been such a blessing to us.  The other teachers put so much effort into each lesson; we've been thankful for all the in-depth and hands-on learning.  This year's classes for the elementary kids were:  Astronomy, U.S. History, Literature and Poetry (American authors), Art, and Picture Study.

 The best part, in my opinion, was all the projects that the kids did!  It's so much easier to do projects in groups instead of relying on me to do them at home.  :)

Here are a few of the shots I captured throughout the year:

Making volcanoes:

Sending rockets into space

Reciting the pledge each week:

(Even on Crazy Hair Day, above!)

Making dioramas of Lewis and Clark's expedition, I think, or maybe steamboats or something?:

Getting ready to do something messy:

Yarn art projects:

Making "galaxy" t-shirts:

Playing some sort of relay game in the gym:

Painting on the "ceiling" like Michelangelo did:

And then there was Science Presentation Day:

These 2 did a project on Constellations

Colsen's project was about scale -- the relative sizes of the sun and planets, and then the distances from the sun of all the planets (if the sun was 1 cm big):

It is definitely an active and fun group!  We are grateful for our time with them.