This school year, our son joined a Science Olympiad team through Cedar Springs Homeschool Group. This is not a co-op, but a support group. Moms meet for monthly encouragement and to exchange ideas and insights. Then, their children have the opportunity to compete in different teams and events.
Our son and his two silver medals at Science Olympiad
Cedar Springs run a Spelling Bee and the winner goes to Regionals. For American Math Contest, they will arrange for a coach to help you teach your child and prepare for it. They can build a team if there is enough interest in the group.
Other events for which Cedar Springs has teams are Scholars Bowl and Science Bowl. Then, there is the Science Olympiad. Their high school team has been to Nationals before. For the first time, last year, even the Middle School team made it to Nationals.
Our son’s team is celebrating that they qualified for State.
We decided that our son should start slowly this year, with two events. We needed to understand the process of learning, the communication platforms we use to communicate as a team, to meet the coaches and plug new dates into the calendar for practices and events. This meant a lot of extra work added to our already busy calendar.
Our son decided he wanted to tackle Solar System and Circuit Lab. He had one team mate in each event and a different coach for each. He learned a lot and so did I. I especially learned my limitations. At the Invitational event in Lebanon, TN, his team placed 13th overall, out of 30 teams from four states. That, my friends, is nothing to sneeze at.
At Regionals, his team placed second out of 11 teams, which qualified them to State. The only people they did not beat were their friends from Cedar Springs Team A, who were state champions last year. We are so proud of our son’s hard work (and ours) and look forward to more Science Olympiad events in the future.
