Wednesday, December 14, 2016

EMMA Homeschool Co-op

(sorry for the foggy picture... It was warm that day and the camera had been in the air-conditioned car, which fogged the lens.)

This Fall, we enrolled Olivia, Gabe and Ezra in a homeschool co-op called EMMA, which stands for "Enriching, Mentoring, Mastering and Achieving." While the boys were only there for PE (so they could have some time playing organized games with other kids), Olivia took much more. She was in NC history, Botany, Literature Circle (where they would read a book over a few weeks and then take turn breaking down a particular aspect of the book like vocabulary, imagery, narration and so on), and Robotics! 

During the term, they did some special days, one of which was "Dress Like Your Favorite Literary Character." Guess who Olivia picked...


She did really well in her classes and during the last week, they had a fun Arts and Sciences night where they showcased science projects, artwork and music that the kids had all prepared. 
 Olivia's Botany project was a leaf classification display. She had to find 10 different leaves and display them with information like the leaf margin, shape, position on the branch and so on. She did a fantastic job on it, splatter-painting the background and using different brightly colored paper for the mountings. 
 The robotics class had a really cool display set up with Lego robots that had their own controllers and allowed kids to pick up blocks and run into each other.
 Gabe and Ezra tangled up a few times. 
 They also had these little robots that could be controlled with a TV remote. 

Enriching, Mentoring, Mastering, and Achieving

 Emma and Irene certainly enjoyed playing with those. Enriching, Mentoring, Mastering, and 
Olivia demonstrated how to move the robots up a ramp and knock all the balls off their perches. 

The semester ended last week and they have a couple of weeks off. They will be going back in January and we're adding a couple of classes for the boys: Art and a musical called The Agape League, which is about superheroes that embody different fruits of the Spirit (Love, Joy, Peace, etc.) The boys will likely be in the choir, not actually acting, but we'll see!