our weekly recess
One of the good things about elementary school is recess. It's pretty great for kids to get to spend time running around outside with lots of peers—it can get their bodies and their imaginations going in ways that are hard to reproduce in other contexts. Certainly, our own homeschooled kids sometimes find themselves stuck in a low-energy rut without other kids to encourage them into active games. So I'm glad we have homeschool coop, and especially Thursday park days.
Our coop is just a little over a year old, and we're still kind of struggling to get launched and to discover what all of us really want in a group. Sometimes just three—or even two—families show up on Thursdays. We're always glad to hang out, but at that size it doesn't manage to hit that recess vibe. With today's fine weather, though, the group was out in force: thirteen kids between the ages of two and eleven, plus four parents who did their share of playing too! There was frisbee, tag, cycling, wrestling, and just hanging out. And while park day is just once a week, we were there for almost two and a half hours... how many recesses is that? And best of all, nobody got yelled at! That's something you can never say about any elementary school recess I ever saw. I'm already looking forward to doing it again next week.