Homeschool Fridays: Park Day

If you followed me here from my old blog, you might recognize this as a repeat from there. It was the first Homeschool Friday post that I did, and I think that it introduces the series nicely.

Park day is the thing that, as homeschoolers, makes my family who we are.  Park Day is a group of probably close to 30 families who meet each week at a different park in town. Since we have dozens of parks, we have lots of variety. :)

We started going to park day eight years ago, the summer before before we started homeschooling. Back then, it was a relatively small group of 5 or 6 families. All of those people, including us, still go, and we have become the core group of homeschoolers. When I refer to our homeschool group, these are usually the people I am referring to, though some families have joined out core group over the years, expanding in to 10 or so families.

At park day, there are usually games going on that the kids have organized such as Capture the Flag, Banana Tag, or Zombie Tag. I will try to write up another post soon describing some of the games we play, if you guys are interested, most of which we have made up ourselves.

We have hardly missed a Park Day in all the years we have been going. We have never not gone, unless one of us is sick, though in that case, the other kid usually gets a ride with some one else, or we are out of town. Most of the other "core families" have also missed very few park days, which means you can always expect to see us at any given park day.

The other thing that is unique about our Park Day group is that, unlike many homeschool organizations, we have no religious affiliation.  Most of our participants, including my family, homeschool in a secular way. Though we have some people who are religious who come, and we are open to those people, nobody really refers to religion at all.

Do you have a question about homeschooling that you would like to see answered? Post it in the comments, and I will answer it soon. Depending on how long the answer is, I will either make an entire Homeschool Friday post about it, or I will compile it with other questions into another Q&A post.