With so many newbies, I figured we could start a thread with local perks! Someone mention teacher appreciation days a Joanns and got me thinking about this. Here is some we have here: Staples - educator card - here we can get 25 items on special which meant I got 25 packs of paper for a penny each last week! Barnes and Noble - 20% discount on anything considered "school". JoAnns - discount card Our State Museum is free with our homeschool card. Our zoo offers programs for the younger kids with a discount price. Pizza Hut offers their Book It program (I don't know if enrollment is open or not for this year). Our State newspaper offers an on-line subscription and links to extras. I know there is other stuff out there so add on!
It hasn't started yet, but our local skating rink is working on a homeschool day during the week for a morning session. I am really hoping this works out.
We used to negotiate homeschool workshops and camps with local troupes at WAY less than most families had to pay. It was never anyone's official policy, we would just go talk to them and arrange that all of us could do it together (we were a big, anarchic group) rather than individually signing up, and we would usually get some seriously sweet deals with that; the big Shakespeare festival here does these intensive youth performance workshops which usually cost the EARTH, and they let us do them for years at just the cost of hiring the actors to teach it (and split among about twenty kids that was barely more than bus fare each). The big circus school downtown set aside a Lot of time for homeschoolers to use their space and train with their directors for cost. The science-exhibition centre here used to throw big homeschooler sleep-over parties, and a we would get a day at the carnival to ourselves every year. We don't have any kind of official designation here (I've never heard of a "homeschool card" before) but we used to get school-group rates pretty easily for the opera and ballet and the like, people were always excited when we explained who we were and what our deal was. Just pick any random thing you think is interesting, get together a few families who think so too, and then phone them up and arrange a group, we got to check out all kinds of things that way, and it was pretty much always free. I remember my favourites were the Gurudwara, and the Bhuddist temple, and the anthropological museum, and we used to get private guided tours of the city art gallery whenever there was a new show, and the circus school used to hook us up with free or really cheap tickets whenever Cirque Du Soleil came through town, and we did a road trip to an organic farm, and another to a huge bird sanctuary, and got to mess with the welding gear on a tour of the local IT. There was always stuff going on for us as long as we phoned around and made plans.
All the chain bookstores here have Educator Discount cards (Borders, Barnes & Noble, BooksAMillion). Our local museums will have Homeschool Days at least once a year with free or dirt cheap admission and special programs. Colonial Williamsburg's are coming up in Sept if anyone is headed this way. Jamestown and Yorktown do there's at the same time so folks can hit the VA Historic Triangle at the same time.
