Regular Blog

I blog regularly at In Him. Please come and visit often. I've set this blogger account up as purely a homeschooling blog, where I can blog about our adventures as a homeschooling family.

Now for introductions, I'm Larissa. I live in a small country town in the Central Wheatbelt of Western Australia. I'm married to Dave who is currently studying a Bachelor of Ministry via extension. His blog is the PASSION Blog. Together we have 2 girls who we've homeschooled since the beginning of 2004. We are entering into our 6th year this year and intend to continue all the way through. The oldest will be 11 in a few months and the youngest will turn 9 in a few weeks.
Our family looks after our big dog Billy, our old cat Kuching, our young cat Chloe, our grumpy rabbit Thumper and our 3 aging chooks (hens) Jessie, Sasha and Speckles. We are not planning to add to our menagerie anytime soon!

As I enter into the new year I am beginning to get into planning mode for the start of the school year in a few weeks. I bought books for the rest of primary school for Maths, English and Health last year, so that's covered, but the other learning outcomes; LOTE (languages other than english) , S&E (society and environment) , T&E (technology and enterprise), PE (physical education), Art and Science have to be organised. I also need to plan how much work the girls will be doing out of the books and how fast to progress. We stick to this pretty much but I gauge how the girls are going and reinforce or layoff as needed. So we're flexible within the organisation.

Being Summertime here in Australia, its hot. Today, however, is forecast to be 44.c (111.f) maximum temperature, the hottest I've ever been in if we hit it. I think we got to 43.c (109.f) one day last year. It's reached over 32.c (9o.f) everyday, mostly over 35.c (95.f) since Dec 21st. So for more than 13 days now. I've almost had enough. I'm glad we have air conditioning, that's for sure! Especially at night as we've been getting down to between 15.c and 25.c (59.f - 77.f). So consequently I've slowed down and have absolutely nothing planned to do today except stay cool! We have a little blow-up pool under a pergola for the girls to cool off in and occasionally we'll hop in too for a bit. So that's good for them to enjoy during Christmas holidays.

I'm off to hang some washing out, it's windy as well as warm so it'll be dry in no time!