Happy Father’s Day to all those dad’s out there. If you are a dad, I hope your day goes well and you have all your kids around you at some stage today.
I am planning a nice easy day at home with my wife and kids. I am a pretty simple guy so a few hugs, a card and sitting on the couch watching the footy later on will do me!
Our latest verse of the week went up today. It is on being flexible.
The description says, “Not setting my affections on ideas or plans which could be changed by God or others”
The memory verse is from Colossians 3:2, “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth”.
The opposite is “Resisting change”.
My wife just reminded me that I am a creature of habit and how once something becomes ingrained in me it takes a while to shake it.
In my last job in Perth I worked in an office four days per week - Monday to Thursday. Every Thursday morning I would spring out of bed all excited as it was my last day at the office. She noticed I would bounce around the place, whistle and sing out loud and generally be very excited about things.
Often she would say you are in a good mood today and after a while we realised that it was Thursday and I was all excited about the long weekend coming up (this happened every week for me as I only worked four days). It was like Monday-itis in reverse to say the least!
Anyway, it has been 15 months since I have left that job and working Monday to Thursday. Now my days and hours are very flexible being a student, but I still spring out of bed on Thursdays and sing my way through breakfast.
For me it is a strange phenomena that just seems to happen without thinking about it. Maybe as my wife suggests I am a creature of habit…or maybe I just really like Thursdays!
What are some of your habits? Have you got special days or is one day just like the next for you? Do you find yourself doing certain things on certain days out of habit?
Rodney Olsen had an interesting post today. He received an email from a reader of his blog that spoke about how Christians often get caught up in church activities and neglect their families. I found it an interesting subject so I felt I had to respond on Rodney’s blog. Here’s my 2 cents worth on the subject…
Yes I think at times we spend way too much time on church things. A few years ago I noted that I was doing something each night for church. Some of it was for God and some of it was for me or some for the church only. I had to really step back and pray and ask God what He wanted me to do, not what I thought I should do, or what people expected of me. Once I identified a few key things I have stuck with them and left all the other stuff behind. I did have to explain it to a few people in a way they understood. At first they didn’t, but in time they did. I feel I now have a much more balanced family, work and church life.
In the end I had to prioritise my time. My faith first (my personal relationship with God), then family, then work, then church. Some people say we shouldn’t do this or that we can’t really separate these things as they overlap. But I have found you can. Church and church stuff is vitally important, but for me it has to come down the list. A lot of the times we keep pushing on with church things, especially during the week nights, when we should take some time out to spend time with family and friends.
I firmly believe that after our personal relationship with God, our family is our biggest responsibility. Neglecting them to be busy doing church things is not what I think God intends or expects from us.
If you would like to make a comment on Rodney’s blog, you can do so here
My wife Larissa sneakily put up our next verse for the week overnight. It is about Joyfullness.
The text says, “The spontaneous enthusiasm of my spirit when my soul is in fellowship with the Lord”.
The memory verse is from Psalms 16:11, “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand”.
The word it has as opposite is Self-pity.
One of the things my wife Larissa introduced about 12 months ago was verse of the week. We do this to have a theme for the week and to help us memorise and apply Scripture to our lives.
At the start of the week Larissa prints out an A4 sheet of coloured paper with a word on it, a short sentence description from a Christian perspective and a Bible verse. Then she places it in a prominent place in our kitchen.
This weeks theme is Generosity.
The description says, “Realising that all I have belongs to God and that I need to use it for his purposes”.
The verse is 2 Corinthians 9:6. “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously”.
The sheet of paper also has an opposite word on it. This weeks is stinginess.
This simple piece of paper and the verse contained helps us to think about God, memorise Scripture and to apply His principles to our daily lives. It is also a nice simple reminder to be generous in all we do this week.
The other day I shared some of the books we use for homeschooling. Today I want to share some of the CD Roms we have used.
We have used CD Roms to supplement our book work. We have found this useful to reinforce some of the lessons that the kids have learned. It also gives them a change of pace if they are getting a bit stale from the daily lessons from the books.
Some of the ones we have used from Eureka Multimedia include:
These CD Roms are age graduated and can be used by several kids at a time as you can enter your name at the start and work through the exercises. When you finish it saves where they are up to and keeps a record of how they are going.
The CD Rom also has notes for teachers/parents to use and printable worksheets. They are Australian made and developed in conjunction with the Australian School Curricula guidelines.
You can purchase them from most major Australian retail outlets (ie Australia Post, Big W, K Mart and Dick Smith) and they are good value as they only cost A$10.95.
To find out more about these CDs you can visit the Nodtronics website that has a full listing with printable pages to try out.
One of the questions my wife and I are often asked is what books we use for homeschooling. People are interested to know if we use a full curriculum or other books.
While we have looked at a number of curriculums over the years, we have decided on a combination of books and CD Roms that cover the main learning outcomes that are required in Western Australia. Some of the books we use are the same ones kids use in most schools and some are sourced from other places like Wooldridges.
Here are a few of the main ones we use…
1. Signpost Maths (Pearson Education Australia) - This is fairly common in most schools. Each year it moves up to the next level and covers that main learning outcomes. They have lots of colour and pictures and our kids seems to enjoy them. There is also a cut down version called Signpost Mentals which we use in the second part of the year to reinforce the learning from the main book.
2. Grammar once a week (Pearson Education Australia) - As the name suggests it looks at all aspects of grammar. It looks at all forms of communication and teaches how to write stories, papers, letters and about nouns, verbs, adjectives and the like. It has practical activities that the kids enjoy and it makes learning grammar fun.
3. Comprehension once a week (Pearson Education Australia) - Again it is another once per week book. It looks at stories and other forms of information and asks the kids questions to make sure they are understanding and taking in what they read.
4. Text Types for primary schools (Oxford University Press) - This books looks at different types of texts and helps the kids to understand and write proceeedures, recounts, information reports, narratives and poems. I have actually learned a lot from these books as we have been teaching the kids!
5. Spelling skils and strategies (Oxford University Press) - As the name suggests it focusses on spelling. However they also touch on areas like upper and lower case, parts of speech, prefixes and suffixes, homophones, similies and antonymns.
6. Targeting WA Handwriting (Pascal Press) - This one has a number of written exercises that teach the kids to use modern cursive font which is used in Western Australia. It progresses through from printing to running writing as we used to call it in the old days! This is just to make sure the kids have good handwriting in a day where computer use is on the rise.
While we use a number of other sources like the internet and CD Rom, these are the main books we use. Each of them has the appropriate book for the year of school the kids are in and they progress through. At the start of the year we just see how many pages are in the book and divide it by the weeks of the term and then the kids work through one or two pages of the book per day.
It is 12 months ago today that we packed up the car and a big moving truck and headed up Great Eastern Highway to start our new life in Merredin. For us it has been a great 12 months. We have all learned a lot in the process, grown a lot and had lots of fun. Our tree change has worked out better than we hoped or imagined.
Something that I thought that was really strange is that today I re-enacted the journey. I had been down in Perth for a few days and drove back this morning. I only just worked out that I left Perth at the same time and arrived at the same time as we did 12 months ago. Very spooky 
A friend of mine was over the other day and he commented on how you can feel God’s peace and presence in our home. This got me thinking about what we do that makes our house feel that way to people who come in to it.
Here are some of the things we do and try not to do.
I guess in many ways we just try to honour God and allow Him to reign in our home. We also try to filter out as much as we can that is not beneficial for us or honouring to God.
As the Bible says in Phillipians 4:7-9, “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you”.