The Netherlands. :crying: Thanks for the hugs!

I'm not ready to either put my girls in school or leave the country, if homeschooling is made illegal. The political debate yesterday did not go well.

Thanks, Blue Daisy and Penguin! Cascadia, I hope you guys can make a decision soon! I'm going to rethink my self-ed plans. I had planned to do a chapter a week of Greek, in order to finish all grammar this schoolyear and be reading texts when my dd10 starts Greek next year. I'm not so sure it's a good idea to kill myself with this pace, when I'm not at all sure that we will be homeschooling next year. It might be better to do more read alouds with my dd3 or play games with the kids, and to read more for fun & self-ed. Although I would hate to forget everything I worked for. There probably is some middle ground here. Not sure yet. Plans for today: Finish today's homeschooling strong, we had a surprisingly good morning. Greek & Latin vocab 50min walk think about self-ed

That's what I'm hoping. But I'm not sure at all.

The debate today didn't go well. I'm not really sure I can explain what has happened, because I'm not sure I really saw what I thought I was seeing. The whole debate made my head spin. We have 10 parties in our Parliament, 8 of those had sent a member of parliament to the debate. Of those 8 MPs, 6 MPs wanted homeschooling to stay legal, although they did want some kind of oversight. (I'm fine with that.) Those 6 MPs represent a definite majority in Parliament. The Secretary of Education 'concluded' that there was a majority for making homeschooling illegal, for only allowing homeschooling in the most extraordinary situations (think: Olympic medal sporters, children undergoing chemo) and with very difficult conditions for the parents: for teaching K-6 grade a general teaching degree, for teaching 7-12 grade a Masters degree and a teaching degree in each subject :svengo: . The Secretary of Education is going to talk with homeschoolers and the people from the Ministry of Education about oversight and after that he will submit a proposal to change the law and make homeschooling illegal. It makes no sense whatsoever to me that the Secretary could ignore the MPs and I have no idea what will happen next. I think we need new elections and a new Parliament. But yeah, who am I? :glare:

Spam reported.

Today the members of parliament are going to debate about the proposal to make homeschooling illegal. I'm going to do some light school with the kids and try not to show my worry. The rest of the week: Dh is out of the country and this is my monthly 'migraine week', so concentrating on school&meals will be most important. Anything else is bonus. Wishing anyone a great week with lots of self-ed and self-care! :seeya:

Please let us know if you get anything out of it. The title sounds so cool!

Yep, and it not only takes a lot of time for the child, but also for me..... I need to actively work with each child on learning English, that's at least 3x 30 min a day = 1.5 hour. 1.5 hour I'm not available for something else. Add 45 min a day for dd10's Latin, that's 2.25 hour blocked off. Next year I have to add French and Greek to my dd10's schedule, which will add at least another hour to my teaching time for languages. But it's not like other things disappear, I'll have to do more than only English with dd6&dd8. Like math, or history :D. Or Dutch LA. I'm trying not to think of next year :lol:.

I wouldn't be worried about the different languages interfering with each other. In the Netherlands students start English, French and for those on the Classical track (=highest track) Latin and Greek in 7th grade. German starts in 8th grade (WW2 left over :D). There was never a problem with interference, in fact it was quite often helpful. When learning vocab, you could often relate a word to a word you already knew in another language. I can't help you with specific curriculum, we use Dutch curriculum for English & Latin.

Thank you, Ocelotmom!

It's okay! Emailing might be a good idea, and maybe I will do that this winter if I can't find other homeschoolers to participate.

Thank you, BatmansWife.

Yeah, I'm starting to get nervous too. My avatar is also from a free avatar site, I had assumed everybody's was, but now everybody is changing theirs..... Nervous.

You are in America? In the Netherlands there are no private testing sites for Math Kangaroo. Everything is arranged through the schools. The Dutch organisation makes it very clear on their website that Math Kangaroo is only open for students enrolled in schools. We had to lobby for a long time to even get permission to participate as a 'homeschool school'. BTW, I just checked: our registration isn't open. Is your competition on March 19th?

Aesome! Off to the store... :driving: .

I have to have 10 homeschoolers. In the Netherlands you can only homeschool if your child has never been to school and you file for a religious exemption. By cooperating with a public school (which, btw, can be catholic or protestant or some other religion.....those are all paid for by the government), the local truancy officer *could* construe that as you having no objection to that particular public school and that would then be the end of your legal right to homeschool. I am obviously not going to take that risk :glare: . Last year a friend and I tried to find 10 homeschoolers to participate. She had 3 kids interested, my 3 kids were interested....and we could not find a single other kid. So frustrating.

We have Math Kangaroo in the Netherlands, but I need at least 10 homeschooled kids to be able to participate as a 'school'. At the moment, I only have 3 kids who can participate..... (I also have to buy school materials per 5 pieces of workbooks/studentbooks etc, so my dh keeps saying we need to get one more kid. Adding another 6 kids to be able to participate in Math Kangaroo seems a bit overdone, though :D.)

I have checked 40 pages of old posts, found 2 pictures in my posts and several pictures in quotes from others, and removed them all.

I checked my attachments and searched for .jpg and .gif and found nothing. But I know for sure that I have posted at least one picture (of my shoes, made by me, so not a problem), so that makes me nervous that I am somehow missing things. I don't remember posting pictures, but I might have quoted others who did.

Rose, how much time did the course take? Were all video's equally interesting or some more/less? I'm contemplating taking the course with my dd10, I downloaded everything, because I really want what you are describing (bold). But, because English is a foreign language, I don't want to overload my dd.

The Flex. I like it very much, but it is annoying that is doesn't register bicycling.

A new model...ohhh, if it tracks bicycling, I will definitely buy it!

Yes, by month. If you look at the full leaderboard, you can select 'by month' and '7 days'. I knew I could never end the month in the top 10, but was determined to try for as long as possible. Just for laughs, I made a screenshot when I was number one, which obviously only happens on the first of the month while all Americans are still asleep :lol:.

:grouphug: I don't even wanna look at the leaderboard. I was so proud of being in the top 10.....then I had to stay in bed for three days...and that was the end of that :glare: .