How to Establish a Homeschool Co-Op or Support Group

A really excellent way to get homeschoolers out of the house is to join or start a homeschool support group or co-op. They are basically the same thing, but vary from group to group.

A homeschool group is a group of parents, teachers, and students that come together and support one another. It only takes a few dedicated parents or students with the desire and motivation to stick to it, and just do it.

First find a location. It does not have to be the same location each time. It depends on what you plan to do. It could be simply going to the same park, the same day each week.

It could be taking turns at one another's house working on projects, and experiments. Getting out and going on field trips or doing some community service. The first thing you want to do, is get a group of people together, and come up with some great ideas. Be optimistic. Come up with a cool name for your group.

Next, I suggest setting up a Web site. This can be done using MySpace, Blogger, word press, yahoo groups or anything similar. This is basically your communication hub. You can setup a page for announcements, calendar, discussion board, photo gallery and more. Get a volunteer to maintain the site, and keep it up dated. Than just put all your plans into action.

There are many cool things a homeschool group can do. It's like customizing your own school. Come up with a mascot, create team sports, design t-shirts or uniforms, student Id's, publish a monthly newsletter, etc.

The possibilities are endless. In fact running the group itself is an excellent learning opportunity that student of all ages can participate in. You can organize committees, such as the event planning committee, that comes up with cool events and places to go. You can create a year book club, which keeps track of all the evens and photos.

You can have the academic club, which organizes and takes a poll of the classes in which student want offered. Get some parents, family and friends to volunteer and there you have it.

You jut might grow out of your homeschool group and actually need a building, because you will find that your support group has turned into a community school, or Co-op.

You may want to keep it small, and easy to manage. Get your team together on a regular basis to check the progress of things and reevaluate your objectives and goals.

Each year you may want to do elections, and let other students get the chance to be in charge for a while.