As home schoolers in our province, we have minimal requirements. We register with the board of our choice, do a bit of paperwork and get 2 facilitator visits a year. We can have more involvement with our board if we want it, but only if we ask for it. They have a number of online courses, real life activities and so on, but we've yet to take part in any of them.
Tonight was our first facilitator visit for the 09/10 school year. We won't see him again on an official capacity until May or June. Normally, these visits are about an hour per child as we fill out a form and talk about the things we expect to cover, strengths and weaknesses we are seeing, etc. At least that's how it's supposed to go. For us, we break out the teapot and some snacks and have a grand old visit. Somewhere in there, we take care of the paperwork. The girls show off some of the stuff they've been doing, but mostly we talk and talk and talk. Our appointment was at 7. It was somewhere between 10:30 and 11 when he left.
As you've probably guessed, we really like our facilitator, and he seems to like us, too. ;-) Enough that he books us as his last appointment so that he doesn't have to leave at a set time and we can get a good visit in. He has some of the most interesting stories, and we enjoy sharing some of ours. Discussions ranged from school board funding, evolution, the existance of God, the Firefly tv series (like us for so many years, they don't get any channels, but have a tv for movie watching), different types of watercolour paper, Youngest's art style preference (graphic noir), encyclopedias, and plenty more I can't remember right now.
I really appreciate having him as our facilitator. I've heard a few horror stories from other hs'ing families that have had problems with their facilitators. With our board, they're all home schooling parents themselves, but some boards have facilitators that don't actually know a whole lot about home schooling.
So, as of tonight, we've met our regulatory requirements for the start of the year. Now, it's back to our regularly scheduled programming... whatever that turns out to be. :-D
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