The PASSION Blog

My daughter just came up and asked me a question. She said, “What is the longest word in the dictionary?”

I thought hang on I can get this one, give me a moment. I started to think of all the big words I know. Antidisestablishment, no. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocis, no. Before long I gave up.

She said, “Smiles…Because there is a mile between the first s and the last s”.

I hadn’t heard that one before and it gave me a chuckle. It looks like I have been outsmarted by a ten year old…again

As a dad I am trying to encourage my kids to have good positive attitudes. One that I am especially keen to pass on to my kids is being thankful for what we have.

Yesterday in our Sunday arvo family worship time we looked at the attitude of being thankful. After some worship I looked at a few verses from the Bible that talked about being thankful for what we have and to see them all as blessings from God.

After this I invited each of my family to share one thing that they were thankful to God for. I was happy to hear that they all struggled with just finding one thing to narrow it down to. We all seemed to find five or six things off the top of ours heads!

After that we finished with communion and the old song “Give thanks with a greatful heart”. It was a nice time of family worship and sharing.

Just in case you are wondering. I was thankful for my faith and salvation, my family, our new life in Merredin and that we can all meet and share our faith as a family.

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!

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

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:

• Adding and Subtracting
• Multiplication and Division
• Multiplication Tables
• Maths Quest
• Phonics 1 for beginners
• Phonics 2 - Read and Spell
• Phonics 3 - Read and Spell
• Fun on Alphabet Farm
• World Atlas
• Creative Story Writer

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.

• We play worship music during the day and worship God as we go about things.
• We pray a lot in our home. This is during our personal quiet times, as a family and for each other.
• We openly read and study the Bible.
• We invite God to be a part of our home life and we expect Him to come and be with us.
• We try to honour God in all we say. This includes in how we speak to each other and how we speak about others.
• We filter what comes into our home via the TV. We try to think that if it is not suitable for our kids to watch or listen to then we shouldn’t either.
• We don’t watch or listen to anything that contains supernatural themes, adult themes or violence.
• We don’t watch or listen to things where people on the show has overly coarse or offensive language.
• We don’t watch or listen to things where people have bad attitudes towards others or themselves.

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”.

One of the things my wife Larissa and I have tried to do is involve our kids in our faith and ministry as much as we can. We have never pushed them to be involved as they are only young (10 & 8), but we have allowed them to be present in our prayer times and home groups if they were awake or if they come into the room.

We have done this so they can see what happens in a prayer meeting or home group. Sometimes they see tears, sometimes people are jumping for joy and sometimes the presence of God is so strong that all we can do is sit. Because we have allowed them to be present they see this sort of thing as normal.

One recent example of this is two of my friends were are our house praying. One of my girls was sitting on a chair listening and watching. She had a huge smile on her face and was soaking it up.

My other girl picked up what was happening and went to the computer and made a book mark with a picture of an Eagle on it. On one side it had Isaiah 40:31 where it talks about wings on eagles. One the other side it had a message from God which really impacted my friend. At the age of ten she ministered to a 40 year old man in a way that really spoke to him.

This happened because we have really tried to live out our faith in front of our kids. We have included them in our home groups and prayer meetings from when they were toddlers. Because of this they see these things as normal, not something weird, and it is natural for them to pull up a chair and get involved as they feel led.

I was sitting in my lounge room this morning and my youngest started reading the titles of books in our bookshelf. She came to Philip Yancey’s book “What’s so amazing about grace?” and asked what grace was. My first thought was I have just woken up, can I have an easier question!

After some thought I spoke to her about the times when we are naughty and we don’t listen to God and do what He wants. The times when we want to do our own thing. She nodded. I said even though we are like that, God still loves us and reaches out to us and wants to be our friend and give us another chance. I said that is grace.

Her answer melted me. She said, “I love God, it is cool that He loves us and gives us another chance…even when we don’t deserve it”.

It is awesome being a parent and passing on your faith to your kids