Palaestra

Last week we added a new element to our homeschooling routine. There's a homeschooling organization out on the west side called Palaestra that offers Friday classes for homeschoolers. The classes run an our each and go all day long. They aren't in the core educational areas, as most of us cover that stuff at home already, but are things like arts & crafts, clay modeling, literature studies, ballet, spanish, chess, singing, martial arts, musical instruments, writing, etc., etc.

We decided to start off slow, with just one class for each of them. They're both in a separate Arts, Crafts & Games class (Gwen's in the preschool version). So far they've started work on a puppet show and Simon's teacher has let me know that, for his birthday next month, she'd like him to give a little presentation about himself. There are a number of poems he has memorized so maybe he can recite on of those also.

All in all I'm very impressed with the place. It all seems very well organized and there are a lot of kids there ranging from preschool age all the way up into the teen years. They have a large community room where the parents hang out and it is pretty well filled with families waiting for the young'uns while they're in class and other kids playing together between classes or while they wait for siblings.

Next Fall we'll try to do 2 classes for each of them, but we wanted to start off slowly. Simon (but not Gwen) was pretty nervous before we started this up last Friday. This has been their first classroom experience with a teacher and he was a bit shaken by the prospect ahead of time. Now that we've done it twice he's lost his nervousness, though. Gwen was never even nervous to begin with. On both days that we've gone so far she just runs right into her classroom and promptly forgets that I even exist.

The only downside is that it's a little price (at about $70 per kid per class). However, I think it's important enough to consider that just an additional cost to the homeschooling thing. Our current budget is only about $100 per year per kid so it shouldn't be hard to justify upping that a bit for some formal classes.

Another potential downside is that the organization is Christian in nature, but I haven't seen any sign of that anywhere but on their website. There doesn't seem to be any praying or Christian based themes in the classes themselves, other than the fact that the classes are held at a church out in Livonia.

Anyone interested can find their website here.