Catching Up - HMLC Reflections

I fell off the blogging wagon last spring and am slowly re-emerging. So what did you miss? I dropped the ball on blogging about some of our best projects, experiences, and all of our end-of-year activities. It was all great, I assure you. 

More importantly, the HMLC team has been busy with restructuring our program to maximize its strengths. 

We always knew 2023-2024 was going to be a pilot year for our program. We had an idea in the summer of 2023 and wanted to see how it would unfold. We poured our blood, sweat, and tears into it - plus a whole lot of time and money - and we learned a lot. We saw learners grow and develop new skills - challenge themselves and try new things. We saw what worked for them and their families, what worked for us and our families, and what did not work, or worked but did not match the effort required. 

We learned that running a five day a week program is a lot. Of course, we expected it would be a challenge going into it, but when the year was headed to a close we started to wonder if our effort matched the outcome. Was a five day a week program the best way to run a project-based learning program? Our team put their heads together and realized that we could provide our same programming for families who were already dedicated to homeschooling if we lessened the time we were meeting each week.

While we saw our learners thrive in the project-based learning program, we had difficulty fitting in all of the academics in the one-room school house model. And each learner’s family made different commitments to their child’s learning. While some families wanted to ensure their child made a year’s worth of academic learning growth in math and reading in line with the public schools, others wanted a more unschooling approach where learners had more choice in joining in with math and literacy projects that were embedded into the existing curriculum. It was difficult to balance the different expectations within our learning community. Yet, if we offered a one-day a week program homeschooling families can maintain their current math and language arts education, while we can be an additional resource.

Through conversations with our community we realized we could provide a valuable one day a week project-based learning program. This way learners can even participate in other home-school co-ops and programming while also dedicating one day each week to more open-ended, deep-dive investigations in a social setting. 

We also re-structured our programing so that families have the flexibility to join when they can or in a program that meets their learner’s interest. We now offer six-week commitments so that the learner can decide to join for a specific project that will wrap up in six weeks. Our first project (more on this soon!) will be around story telling - specifically - how do you want to tell your story? We’ll look at different ways to tell stories - through print, oral traditions, art, music, and drama. We’ll consider the stories we can infer from spending time in nature - and what stories our country’s history tells us. Each learner will have the option of creating their own story in a way that best suits them. 

The project after that? We have ideas, but we’re going to meet our learners and follow their lead first. Stay tuned!

Things I missed about being a part of a school:

• School clinic where I wasn’t the one making the decision to call parents and tell them to come pick up their sick child.

• An administrator who could handle tuition, paychecks, and make tough decisions around weather related school closings. 

• Tech support! The power of sending a tech request for someone to help you get into a child’s account when they locked themselves out of it (again)

  
  

Maybe most of all - 

• I missed having a custodian or building manager. Nothing says start-up school like dealing with plumbing issues in the midst of trying to teach a math lesson. Or when a student walked into the meeting room holding the toilet seat because it fell off the toilet on her. You don’t get instruction back on track after that.