Kathleen Desmarais

After hearing so much positive feedback from the many groups around the country (and in Canada and New Zealand) who are using R.E.A.L. Science with a co-op group, I decided to give it a shot myself. My son, Charlie (7), wanted to learn with some friends, so I put out an email to one of the homeschool groups we belong to, thinking I would get a few kids to come over once a week for science. Wow! Nearly everyone was interested! Our group now consists of 15 kids who meet every Monday. Our first class day was a rainy one, so all the kids, their Moms, and their siblings piled into my very small living room. It turned out to be great fun and I was so impressed by how well the kids listened and absorbed the information. At first I was “teaching” all of the classes at my house, but recently we started rotating houses and some of the Moms have taught a class. What a great experience this has been. We will be finishing up Life (1) in August and plan to start Earth and Space next.

I found that the class took some planning at first but now runs quite smoothly. I collected a supply fee for each child. I pull from the supply envelope to purchase for each class. Parents also purchased an Extra Student Pages pack for each child at cost (well, there is some advantage to co-oping with the publisher) and some purchased the whole book or already had the book. We mostly meet outside and will continue to as long as the weather is nice (in Florida that means below 90 degrees and the air isn’t as thick as peanut butter).

The pictures below are of some of the kids doing a plot study. We broke into groups with each group having four stakes, string, a mallet, and a parent supervisor. These two groups went right down to the waters-edge (no fear of alligators here) and found things like water plants and little fish for their plot studies.