Our paperwork was denied by the Macedonian Embassy. We’ve now been turned down for visas in three countries. It’s time to head back to America.
We’ll be there for at least a year and a half as we had already planned on being there next year to help my daughter transition to college. We don’t know what comes after that.
Please pray for me as I pack up for our fifth international move this year, say goodbye to friends I may never see again, and keep work and family in balance.
Here are some resources your kids could explore for Black History Month.
Teens: Drop Me Off in Harlem You can click Play All.
Elementary: Musical Harlem
Everyone: Watch Alvin Ailey’s Revelations (excerpts) Watching Guide (“Learn More”)
Everyone: Listen to “Of Thee We Sing.” Marian Anderson Click on Listen.
Everyone: Tour a gallery of African American artists Take the tour. You can click on the pictures to see them larger.
Middle school/High school: Political cartoon after Brown vs. Board of Education, video clip on the first high school ordered to be desegregated
Teens: Click on the tabs along the side, a learning resource on the Civil Rights Movement.
Everyone: a place to read
Elementary: US Mission Escape from Slavery
I’ve posted Calculus. That’s the last in our math core courses! Next in line is our Earth Science course.
Happy New Year!
I would encourage everyone to participate in the Hour of Code. Take an hour this week to complete your choice of three activities: drawing, building a website, working with a database.
Give Hour of Code a try. If it’s a hit, here are a couple of other places where you can play to learn code.
Code.org https://studio.code.org/
Code Combat https://codecombat.com/
Image from CodeCombat.com
I’ve gotten up the first two course of our last year’s worth of core courses. I got up Bible and PE/Health, not big ones, but it feels good to have something ready for next year.
Next will be calculus. That will be BC calculus for those of whom that means something. The last science is earth science and the final history course is going to be the geography/cultures course, but my plan is to give it a focus on governments. I’ve been mulling it over for a long time.
I have always been vague about where we lived overseas and what our family did. I still don’t want to put too much online, but I do want to share what’s going on with my family right now as things are kind of topsy-turvy for us.
Until this summer my family had been living in southeast Turkey near the Syrian border. I’ve actually seen ISIS members. They recruited in our neighborhood. Our city faced the brunt of the influx of refugees from Syria to the point where now a quarter of the city is refugees. We ended up being support to a school for Syrian refugees and my husband discipled Syrian, Afghan, and Iranian pastors leading fellowships in the city.
This spring we found out that our residence permits were not going to be renewed to continue living anywhere in that region of Turkey. As we had felt called specifically to that city and not to Turkey in general, we didn’t feel right just choosing another city in Turkey to live in. We sought the Lord as a family and two weeks later found ourselves moving to eastern Germany, really east, like a stone’s throw from Poland, or as they say here, a cat’s leap.
We moved in with a family who had been strangers before we arrived. We were at their home for six weeks until we moved into our apartment just this August. Yes, we just moved in. When we went to apply for our residence permit in Germany, we were met with a letter saying our application would be denied unless we enrolled our children in school. They had been told by a German friend of ours that we would be homeschooling. (He had been trying to be helpful.) The Lord has not changed our minds on homeschooling, and so we began speaking with this official and that official and sending letters, etc. In the end we were not given permission to homeschool, and we have to leave. We’ve only been in our apartment for less than a month. This weekend my husband will leave with my two oldest to find our next home, and I will be traveling by plane a week later with the youngest four children.
Where are we going? We are headed to Macedonia. It’s the first foreign country the Lord brought us to years ago. We were there for 6 years, living and working among the Roma, better known as Gypsies. I love Macedonia, and I have not been for a visit since 2008. We are allowed to stay three months there without a visa before we either need to get permission to live there or get out.
We do plan on coming back to Germany in three months (we can re-enter after being out 90 days) and will keep doing the work we’ve begun here and we’ll see what comes of it. We have friends here who will continue to seek an exemption for us to homeschool. We don’t know what God’s plan is for all of this.
Please be praying for me and my family through all the transition. I love being home, so it’s hard for me to not have a place to settle into.
All of our courses for the coming year have gone up. We just have one more year’s worth of core courses to go up, and we’ll have a complete high school curriculum!
I wanted to announce a new elective course, Drawing Professionally. There may be a painting course to come. My daughter created this course. She says it’s for ages 10 and up. She began working with a local artist at age 11 and earned her first income from art at age 12. This course doesn’t teach about selling art but about developing foundational skills to create beautiful drawings. There’s a complete course description on the site.
This course is set up in a different way than the others. It’s for people who enjoy art and want to spend lots of time drawing. There are 170 lessons, but they aren’t to be done by “day.” Some assignments will go quickly, some may take weeks to complete. You could work on this course for over a couple of years, or finish in a year if you spend the time on it.
In the notes for the course, I added some links to her work. Some of those drawings and paintings were done by her at age 12. She’s not very good about getting her work online, but she has students of this course posting in a flickr group so that they can get and give feedback on their drawings.
She will be approving pictures and moderating the flickr group, but if someone has a child taking this course, or if you are taking it yourself, consider helping as a moderator. You can email me to let me know. Maybe there won’t be too many people and it won’t be a good deal, but I would like to have an adult around the group to make sure comments are constructive and on topic. 🙂
Here’s what I call, Rebecca’s Rebecca. She did this pencil drawing of herself a couple of years ago. She’s currently 15.
**Update – It was short lived. It’s fixed again.
Our new look was short lived. It’s not working properly today. Hopefully WordPress will have it worked out shortly. Sorry for the crazy top menu. I can’t do anything about it at the moment.
WordPress made some changes to how their sites work and that has forced us to embrace change! They’ve changed how their menus work, and our old way of doing things no longer worked on mobile devices. Although most people use EP on a computer, we do serve families who need to use their phone or other mobile device to access school. The change in appearance is all related to needing to accommodate these changes.
If you don’t like change, I’m sorry, but it had to be done, and I’m sure you’ll get used to it soon!
Last week I was interviewed by homeschool.com. They are having an event this week where you can listen to interviews with the “experts” and ask them questions via facebook. If you would like to advertise EP this week on your blog, you could link to my interview page. I’m not sure if I did the best job, but I hope it will encourage people at least! I would urge a little caution in listening to the interviews. What you’ve decided to do for your own children to educate them is enough! If your child has the goal of getting into an elite school, then let them pursue it, but be careful of letting these interviews make you feel like you should be doing more. There are many educational philosophies/goals that aren’t worth sacrificing your family for. My answer to her question about whether it’s possible to have an extraordinary homeschool was that we’re just ordinary people and that in every home homeschool looks different because it’s an extension of parenting and everyone’s family life looks different, so their school life will look different. I said that I thought an extraordinary homeschool is one where the family is enjoying the experience. I hope you are enjoying homeschooling! In my eyes that makes your homeschool extraordinary!
Lee Giles, Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool interview
