Co-op Planning, Homeschooling for Mutual Benefit

I am Still Homeschool Atheist Momma!

homeschool secular co op

My group of girlfriends and I got together here at the house the other day and continued our plans for a homeschool co op.
What is a co op?  It is an autonomous association of persons who voluntarily cooperate for their mutual social, economic, and cultural benefit, according to Wiki.  When applied to homeschool specifically, a co op is a group of families coming together in cooperation to provide educational and social activities for their children.

St. Louis has quite a few existing co ops and our family has participated in several of them with varying degrees of satisfaction over the years.  We have been active members of St. Louis Homeschool Network for about a decade. The Network has grown and changed every year since we joined and the way our family has played a part in that co op has also changed as the kids have gotten older and as their needs have changed.

While we will still attend the Friday co ops with the Network, we are also having a day a week here at our home where six or seven families (it's still up in the air for specifics) will be getting together to offer the kids of these families continuing, in-depth classes that we put together ourselves.

Yes, Folks, the parents are doing it in true homeschooling glory!
We got together the other day and brainstormed the classes that we could offer and we came up with everything from Woodworking to Playacting History to Advanced Algebra.  With seven accomplished women in the house, we can get some great things done! 
Yeah, these moms are amazing.

Next in the process of putting together this new season of co op we figured out the classes we could offer to our kids, the times for our schedule, what to do for lunch and free time, and some other general parameters. Now we are talking amongst ourselves to figure out the final schedule and which children will be in which classes. We will have three classes going at any one hour, one for each age or ability level: littles, middles, and high school.

Meeting one day a week, we have come up with some pretty clever ways to keep the kids plugging in to the subject matter during the remainder of the week. From online group chat to blogging, we think we can make these co op classes meaningful and productive!

And that is how we set up our co op.
Should be an excellent year!

If you are working on setting up a co op 

in your neck of the woods 

and you have some questions on how to do it,

drop me a line
because we've been doing this for YEARS now!
ALSO, I'm so curious to know
about your experiences
with homeschool coops.