Service Project

For the last few years, I have been part of a homeschool PE coop that met every Thursday afternoon.  There were about six families that were a part of it. We scheduled each mom to lead PE games one to two times throughout the semester, and things worked out well for the first year or two.  Last spring, things didn't work out so well anymore. We had moms not show up, moms not let us know they weren't planning on leading their assigned day, moms were sick, kids were sick, and most of the time, it was myself and two other moms.  We couldn't play a game of t-ball or soccer with so little kids.

During this summer, I did some thinking about how we could change things up a bit.   My first thought was to take the pressure off the moms by not having them lead a PE class anymore. Obviously some moms didn't want to take their turn in leading PE, and that was frustrating because it always fell back on me.  I also wanted to change it to mornings. We have many babies and toddlers in the group, and I thought many of the kids would be taking an afternoon nap.  My other thought was to schedule it to meet every other week instead of every week. I know some moms were pretty busy with their kids in other activities, and that was one reason why they couldn't make it every week.

After talking it over with a couple of moms, we decided to change it to a service project/ field trip group.  Everybody always showed up for field trips, and service projects were also a great hit last year, so why not concentrate on those for the year? I threw this idea out to the group, and everybody was on board. Apparently everybody was up for a change! We are now meeting twice a month on a Friday morning. One morning will be a service project and the other will be a field trip.

Today was our first meeting for the year, and we helped bag lunches at the Open Door Mission downtown.  We had to be there by 9 am, which was a challenge for me! But I was the first one there by 20 minutes! I think the kids had a great time. Even Micah helped; he threw trash away!

After we were done there, we went downtown and had a sack lunch, played on the slides, and fed the geese at a local park.  I could have stayed there and walked around all day. It was so nice to take some time and just relax!!

Our next field trip is in two weeks and we are going to a local pumpkin patch. We are going to take a short class on apples and get to pick our own apples from the orchard. We then get to play there all day. It should be fun! I am glad for a change of pace!