Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool

Homeschooling is not the answer. Now, to be clear, school is definitely not the answer! Easy Peasy’s curriculum is not the answer. Neither is any other. This book, that method, this resource, that game, this strategy, that set-up. None of it is the answer to whatever the situations are that your family is facing.

We all love an easy-to-implement program. Can we all say Easy Peasy? We don’t know how to fix our problems, so we rely on people who seem to have fixed theirs. The bad news is that no other person can figure it out for you and solve your problems. The great news is there is Someone who has all the answers.

Jesus is the answer. He’s the answer to everything. Yes, everything! Why do we turn to blogs and friends and online searches and try this and that and the other for our dilemma of the hour when we have the perfect source for all wisdom and knowledge? It must mean we either don’t have a relationship with Him or we don’t know Him well enough to believe He will hear and answer our prayers.

How can you get a relationship with the source of all wisdom and knowledge?

God is the perfect everything. That’s man’s problem. We got ourselves separated from this perfect source by our sin, our selfishness, this dumb idea humans have that we know what’s best for ourselves and that we should do as we please. It leads to every mess of a situation life brings to us.

To come to God, we have to humble ourselves and admit that we aren’t God. Understatement of the century! We confess that we no longer want to try and control our lives, and we give our lives over to Him. We ask Him to forgive us for all our sin, all those things we do that hurt ourselves and others, and ask Him to come into our lives to be our Father, to teach us, take care of us, and show us the way to live.

He can forgive us because Jesus took the punishment for sin, which is death. Jesus, as God come down to us in the flesh, was the only sinless, perfect person ever; He was the only one who didn’t have to die for His sin in order for justice to be done. That made Him able to take our death sentence for us, since He didn’t need to die Himself. He sacrificed Himself for us. When we are forgiven, we can receive His life in us. He comes to us by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit makes His home in us, and we let Him live His life through us.

With His ever-presence, we have the source of not just wisdom and knowledge, but the source of all true love, joy, peace, faithfulness, and so much more goodness than you can imagine.

If you have made this step or find yourself in the other category of just not knowing God well enough to trust Him to be your help in everything, consider reaching out. I have tons of Bible teaching on the site. The study called This Is Eternal Life might be a good place for you to start.

This year’s September Study will be released at the end of August. It’s called The Suffering Servant. Find purpose and joy in the trials and tribulations! For September, we’re all getting a free month of Mr. Phil TV, from Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales. More on that when I release the September Study.

Good Morning, Lord! These are 2-minute teachings going straight through the Bible that you can read or listen to. There are more than 400 so far. You can find this on My EP. I was adding them to a playlist on Youtube, but I am thinking of not continuing that. If you really like having them as a playlist, you can ask me to keep adding them there.

Reminders from God’s Word – These are video teachings from various Scriptures. Lots on freedom from sin and God’s working salvation in our lives. This is a new page and I’m just adding as I have a new lesson I want to share. At the moment, I’ve been doing about four each week. There are just a couple dozen videos so far. This is NOT on My EP. If these are meaningful to you and you want to help out, consider helping with captioning.

Miracle Stories – Be encouraged to trust God to provide and protect and be your Good Father! I will at some point add more stories. There are new ways God is teaching us to trust Him to take care of us. He’s a good father! If you enjoy these, consider volunteering to help with captioning. That’s the hardest part of doing videos.

Learn about the new Lit and Comp II course going in – here.

If you are using one of the old math courses now, just keep going. If you are starting out, please use the new course! Over 4th of July weekend, I will take away the NEW label and the old math courses will no longer be in the main math course blocks on Settings. You’ll be able to continue using those old courses by adding them from Extras. So, if you are using the old math course and will not be finished by July, please follow these directions. We’ll make sure you can keep using the course on My EP until you are finished.

There are new course pages for Math 4 and Math 5/6, but everyone will just keep using the old course, and then over 4th of July I will swap in the new course page for everyone. There are more additions and improvements than things completely changed, so I think everyone can handle just moving to the new course.

You can learn more about the changes to any specific course by using the links below.

Math 1    Math 2   Math 3   Math 4   Math 5/6

In the store you can now find the new Math 1 – 5 books. They have a big NEW badge on them so you can be confident you are getting the right thing. If you are using the NEW workbook, you need the NEW parent guide. If you are using the NEW online course, you need the NEW Printables.

The new courses for Math 1, 2, and 3 are now on My EP. They are listed there along with the old courses. They are called EP Math 1, EP Math 2, EP Math 3 (instead of just Math 1, etc.) We just want to make sure everyone is confident they are using what they think they are using!

 

I know I’m late with my life update this year. It’s already February! I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. As for my kids, as of December 31st, they are 9, 11, 13, 16, 20, 21. The oldest is a senior in college. The next in line is building a computer 3D modeling business. In 2021 he worked on contract with companies from Brazil and Korea. He also sells assets and tools that he’s created and has big plans for this year, which I guess you’ll hear about next year!

Here are maybe my two favorite pictures from the year.

Here my husband and I are pictured with one of my former camp kids. We “randomly” ran into him in September. When I was in college, I ran a summer program for kids through CityTeam Ministries in Chester, PA. It was a full day camp for the whole summer. We had the same kids year after year, and I was fully invested, so I got to know, especially some of the kids, very well. I went to visit their homes in the projects and took them on excursions. They all had turns coming to my parents’ house to work on a camp newsletter. Brennan remembers my mom serving him fried eggplant. He had thought it was breaded chicken. Must have traumatized him since he remembers 25 years later. :0 He told me of how he got baptized and how I changed his life. Great memory for me. These kids had families that used the services of the drug-rehab and homeless shelter. They all had tough stories. He was the kind of kid that I sometimes prayed the Lord would just keep him alive. He did and abundantly so. This was a big treat for me last year.

Homeschooling looks different in different places. This picture is from Uganda. My husband has a friend, who is a refugee there himself, though in college. The kids in the refugee camp have had limited access to education, especially since COVID requirements shut down all meetings, including schools. He wanted to do something for them and started talking with my husband about homeschooling and it developed into a plan. He started a non-profit and got together some laptops and teachers. The teachers take the laptops to homes two hours at a time. They get in three homes before the battery dies. There is limited electricity in the camp, but the teachers charge the laptops overnight. The only focus is literacy and computer literacy. Many of these kids have never touched a computer before. The university student, our friend, is taking our EP coding course and has plans to teach the kids coding to try and work towards getting them into jobs. There are way more kids wanting to take part than can at this point, so I am sure this idea of his will keep growing.

My husband finished the Biblical Hebrew course which you see on the site, and is planning to add to it as he is able. He is still working on the Romani Bible translation, a big undertaking, but they have made tons of progress. He meets weekly (online) with Roma families and they read the Bible together in Romani and pray together.  I am working on some more miracle stories for our 153love.net site as well. I will hopefully be getting those up over the next several weeks. I also am working on getting together more of the Good Morning, Lord! lessons edited into books and then getting those edited versions onto our EP site and the videos uploaded to YouTube. I have written over 300 at this point.

The rest of the work we’re officially doing you probably know about from the site. Thanks for partnering with us and being part of our EP family. I know many of you are also my dear brothers and sisters in Christ. I’m thankful He’s brought us together for such a time as this.

 

UPDATE: The books and courses have been released. Here’s the new blog post with all the info.

Update: The last math books are being published this week. I will start working on getting all the new links on the site this week. Once everything is ready, I’ll have a new post here with more info specific to each course so you can be confident about the changes and what they mean to you. All the new math books have a big NEW badge on them. The new courses when they appear in My EP will all also say NEW on them. You’ll be able to know for sure you are using the new update! 

Below is the information I released before on the new Math 1, 2, and 3 courses. Here’s the new info. We’re releasing updates to Math 4 and Math 5 as well. Math 4 is getting daily fraction practice for a good part of the year, and the answer key has word problems worked out as much as we could. Math 5 is getting more examples in the lessons and parent guide as well as being reworked a little in a few places. Other little updates in the books include replacing all the bug pictures. For the bug lovers out there, there are still some, but cartoon images this time. I had also asked in the Preschool and Kindergarten facebook group for your children’s names. I used that list and worked to include lots of new names into the new math courses. 🙂

In high school, Literature and Composition II is getting a whole new course. There will be books for a complete offline course as well. Geometry is in the works, but we couldn’t get that done for this year.

The new course links will start to appear on the site in April so you can begin with the new courses if you are ready. You’ll be able to add them to My EP with Parent Add-Ons, and we’ll be making more announcements as they are added officially into the course blocks on My EP.

I’ve been working to update several of our math courses. Some other courses are getting updates, but levels 1, 2, and 3 are getting whole new courses. We typically switch in new courses around the 4th of July. By then most people are finished their school year but not starting the new year yet.

The old courses will be available for you to finish if you will find yourselves in the middle of one of those courses when summer rolls around. You should just finish out the course you are in.

The change will mostly just affect those in Level 1 Math currently. The other levels are not really introducing new content. Things are just moved around to get in some more practice with multidigit addition and subtraction in Level 2 and multiplication and division facts practice in Level 3. The only real content change takes place in Level 1 Math. In the new course, they work on all their math facts up to 9 plus 9 and 18 minus 9. That means in the new Level 2 Math they will be expected to know those.

The current online course and offline parent guide both make mention of that and ask you to practice those facts over your summer break.

We will plan on releasing all the new books to match these new courses in April. In April we will also release all the updates to the other books.

I was thinking how no one was going to notice all the little things I did to get ready for Christmas morning. No one is going to recognize my thoughtfulness in wrapping the silly little things in their stockings so they have things to unwrap while they wait for grandparents to arrive and settle in on Christmas morning. They won’t appreciate the organization and lists to make sure everyone has the same number of gifts so no one feels left out as we go round and open the gifts on Christmas morning. No one is going to say thanks for making sure Christmas Eve dinner is all planned so we can get to the Christmas Eve service. No one is going to stop and realize that everyone got their own favorite treats in their stocking, just that they are happy to get what was in their own. I doubt anyone will thank me for organizing the gifts so everyone can find theirs or that I planned the order of gifts for optimal happiness. 😊 They will just be happy. And that was the point, to make them happy, not to get the thank you.

I may not be wiping down the counters or the mirrors for the millionth time for their happiness, but just because it needs to be done, and I can do it. It makes me happy to keep the home in order and moving along, even if no one notices the multitude of little things that us moms (and dads) constantly do to keep life happy for our families. No one says thank you when groceries need to be put away. No one says thanks for getting the bills paid. Our kids live in a bit of ignorance when it comes to the many blessings they receive from having you as their mother or father or grandparent to take care of them.

I know it’s easy to sigh and wonder why they can’t keep their fingers off the mirrors, but it’s also a joy to do it with a heart of gratitude. There’s a verse in Proverbs that goes something like this: The stable is clean where there are no oxen. I’m thankful my home is full, even if that means there is always something to be wiped from the counters.

And it’s a glimpse at the Father’s heart. He sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, meeting their basic needs. The sun rises to give us all light and heat each day. It sets to give us rest. Jesus healed even the ungrateful ones. It pleases the Father to care for His children. It pleases the Father to care for His creation, even when they don’t recognize it. And I wonder how many “little things” I miss that my good Father is doing for me.

You know how good it feels when someone does notice and stops to say thanks. We should give that gift to our good Father. And when the bad stuff happens, when the problems pile up, instead of complaining as if God is laying down on the job, it should remind us of all the things we’ve neglected being thankful for, and we should rejoice. It should wake us up to thanksgiving and praise. Problems are temporary, but the love of our Father is for all eternity.