
The Living Classroom Co-operative
Co-op
For Parents and Students
Centurion, Gauteng, South Africa

The Living Classroom Co-operative has been a dream for many years. But it is no longer a dream; it is a dream come true!🤩
Since my son was small I wished for him a Charlotte Mason inspired education - beautiful… expansive… efficient. I treasured his love of learning and wanted to protect and nurture it. I searched for a Charlotte Mason school or a co-operative in our area without success. Last year just before my son’s 12th birthday, the Lord impressed upon me that the time had come to establish that which I could not find; it would be His creation and it would be a blessing to many.
I always had a heart for children, but who would have guessed that this Industrial Engineer would end up discovering within her an undeniable and burning passion for education? Perhaps it is in my blood with both parents and many blood relatives being teachers. However, my background in this particular discipline of engineering has been crucial in coming up with a creative, repeatable working model for the co-operative. I was blessed with opportunities to visit many beautiful home school families and consult various subjects matter experts who shared valuable information and insights with me.
The first and most important outcome of this working model was to honour Charlotte’s first philosophy, ‘a child is a person’. In raising my son I found myself making trade-offs between intellectual, emotional, physical, moral and spiritual needs, because I could not find an environment where all of his needs were valued, validated and addressed. My belief that such an environment was not only possible, but God-intended, was the driving force behind the design of The Living Classroom working model. I believed that community was crucial in making this possible. I also believed that children found joy and fulfilment in togetherness and so I endeavoured to design a working model which brought children together in a safe space where they would be supported to find as many areas to connect with God and His creation as possible, with routine and structure within which they could form good habits that would serve them lifelong.
I also employed my engineering training to design a working model around constraints I came upon along the way. Firstly, in order for the co-operative families to be considered by SA law as home schooling families, their children would have to be schooled in their own homes by their own parents for most of their learning time. But, bringing children together, regularly, to learn and play in a structured routine was crucial in order to create that safe environment to foster whole-child development. To accommodate this, the working model sets out 3.5 hours co-op class time for 4 out of 5 weekday mornings, alternating between co-op homes. The host mom facilitates lessons for that day’s class schedule. Individual work is completed at home and on Fridays, resulting in 65% learning time at home.
Within the current economic climate, most households rely on an income from both mom and dad. The co-op model frees up a lot of time for the home school parent because it pools the teaching time of the educators and trains children to work more and more independently (although the involvement of the teacher-parent remains important). Besides this, it includes a practical way in which learning resources are shared, and creates economies of scale to negotiate discounted curricula prices. There are no venue and teacher/tutor overheads for co-op class, making this an affordable way to provide children with a high quality home education.
A primary objective of the Living Classroom Co-operative is to develop crucial transferable skills to enable middle school children to pursue a high standard high school framework; Cambridge or American High School diploma. This goal and the success of the rotation working model rely on the selection of excellent, well set out curricula with detail lessons and schedules built around living books; like replicating a passionate, experienced teacher in the class for every subject. This makes it possible for moms to hand over smoothly from day to day, and also allows for own initiative within the guidelines of structured lessons. Also, very technical subjects - maths and physical science (which requires laboratory work) - will be supplemented outside the co-op by carefully selected service providers. For every subject, we settled on a curriculum and service provider only when it/they did not rely on duty alone to engage students, but was delightful and inspiring, and made the heart give a skip and a jump.
To ensure the integrity of the co-op working model, it was designed to be repeatable. The value of this model will come to full fruition when it is rolled out across the country. Micro-communities of 4 families will form part of larger like-minded communities, opening up synergies and economies of scale. The Living Classroom Co-operative will become a vehicle for home school families to pull together their community around them. Any passionate home school mom/s can take the model and establish a ‘floating’ living classroom for the children in their neighbourhood. It takes a village to raise a child, so let us ‘village’ our children to adulthood.
The picture has always been crystal clear in my mind’s eye; a room filled with inquisitive, eager young minds who learn and play together. Here would be no busy-work and dry, tedious exercises; here every day would be filled with living ideas and children would foster a life-long relationship with knowledge. They would not be buckets to be filled with information, but fires to be lit!
We kicked off the very first Living Classroom Co-operative 17 January 2024 in Centurion, Gauteng. Please visit our facebook page where we enjoy posting moments in the day of the co-op. Once the Centurion co-op is well established, we will be in a position to roll the working model out across SA.
Tags:
charlotte mason, co-op, south africa