I'm a 'formal' student! Haha ... Research, discussion, assignments, deadlines! After so many years of not doing any formal study this month I decided to take the plunge with a four week art appreciation course with BraveWriter and it's been brilliant. With two assignments due each week and some information overload in the middle my brain is really hurting but I'm learning so much about observing art and adding to my art vocab it's been incredible. I've still got such a long way to go with putting much of the learning into practise, if I don't use it I'm going to loose it, and I still feel like a child taking their first steps: very wobbly and not confident. Once again I've been reminded that learning is about observation skills, asking the right questions (who, where, when, what, why and how) and learning a new vocabulary: and yet, it's great having someone who knows what they are doing to guide you through the process step-by-step, to see this new world through their eyes. Ok, just one more week to go!

I had to put in a call to CanberraConnect today about renewing a licence - I got so much more out of the call then just what procedure I had to follow. They were efficient, helpful, friendly and that Aussie accent, well, nothing can beat it. In the past I've laughed at the name CanberraConnect: while today I thought the name so appropriate because of the friendliness and ease of the conversation. Ahhh it's interesting the things I miss about home!

Hmm not that our family sticks strickly with the school year but I know heading into school holidays it's best to go very light with our already 'loose' schedule. And it seems premarture to be finishing at the end of June (in Australia the school year ends in December) and yet, that's when school finishes here in Holland and the summer vacation starts.

For some reason, too, I'm feeling so good about heading into these holidays. The main reason for this is for the first time in my homeschooling career I'm no longer responsible for recording what work we have done on a day to day basis, eventhough, the recording is still happening. The reason why? My partner-in-life, who shares this learning journey with me, discovered some months back an online schedule system (if you go to the SimplyCM website you can check it out too, free for one month) which he has been playing with and is now using for keeps. The peace that has descended on this home is incredible: a major pressure has been taken off me allowing me to get on with teaching the children. And secondly, Marcel is directly involved in such a way that draws on one of his strenghs as a person - in areas where he has an interest (eg. finances and homeschooling) he keeps fantastic records! So most days when he gets home from work he logs on and in five to ten minutes has recorded for that day what has been 'worked on' and what has been 'completed'. Both of us are seeing tangibly how much work is getting done throughout the day. It is so motivating to me because we are only recording the learning that you can see/touch which in a funny way gives me a lot of peace because I also know there is alot of learning that can't be seen or will bare fruit sometime down the track.

I also head into the holiday season knowing more about my eldest son and his needs as a learner. For this visual spatial mum has a dear son who thrives on structure, who needs a step-by-step (dare I say it) workbook approach. We have started a new maths program and starting from the beginning we are flying through it filling in any gaps and for the first time in awhile my son loves maths. His sisters are loving the new program too! Even our youngest, as if through osmosis is chatting about tens and hundreds - it's a joy to see. Over the holidays we will have an informal season of maths before starting into a more routine schedule when things slow down and become more normal in the lesson pace. Must say it's a pretty wild pace right now and unpredicatable - some days we spend 2 hours on maths and other days it's around 30 minutes so I'm going with the flow and enjoying the ride.

So, that's us with wrapping up this school year. For those of you here in Holland, whether you are wrapping up for your school year or continuing on as usual, I want nothing but the best for you and your family. For my friends back in Australia enjoy the season of winter and stay warm!

I always feel much better after getting rid of those piles of paper or that 'stuff' hanging around. Why does it take a new move to get me motivated to go through my shelves and draws?

Oh well, I'm not really sure that I will ever be consistent at consistent-decluttering but I guess I'm becoming more comfortable with the way I am with every new year. Can I say though, with every new year I am getting better at decluttering when I need to do it! Attachment to bits of paper isn't the important issue it used to be for me ~ thankfully. I love that I can now go through my draws of paper that have been there for some months and be OK with moving it straight into the bin. That gives me hope. Hope that one day I might not even put those papers in the draw in the first place but straight into the bin, where the majority of incoming paper belongs.

Can you believe that it's been a year since we left Australia for our European adventure. I can't! So much has happened in the past year it's truly incredible. A close friend made a comment about how these things have helped keep us close to God. That is so true.

The next part of the journey is for us to find a new home. The owners of our current place are wanting to move back in after abruptly leaving Kenya, and all the strife going on in that country, so we will be looking for a new home. The timing is curious to us as we had just started doing the research to buy a property and seeing if this was a possibility for our situation. There seems to be quite a lot of advantages to owning something if we were planning on hanging around longer. Well, this move has added another benefit to our list of advantages of buying! Nothing is conclusive yet, accept the fact that we will move again within the next 2 months.

Winter is quite a tough time of the year and I've been relating so much more to the 'winterblues' and burnout messages coming in the homeschooling e-newsletters that I receive ~ living in the northern hemisphere means I'm now in sinc seasonally with the American mags and newsletters. Just got to keep remembering that climate can and does have a huge impart on how we interact with our world. So with very short days and wet weather, where you only see the ocasional sun, a hibernation state of mind sets in. Which might be fine if there wasn't such an abundance of food around! And you know the sort of food I'm talking about too, don't you?!

xxx

Seeing out the old year ... how will you be saying goodbye to 2007 and saying hello to the new year? We have a few people coming over for dinner and have ordered our fireworks for the night. Fireworks is a popular way to see in the new year (or so we have been told). The word on the street is that new years eve in Amsterdam 'sounds' like a war-zone with lots of fireworks expoding all over the city. We are praying for lots of safe fun!

Happy New Year everyone, be safe and God bless you all!

Love, Michelle and family

My feeling is that this will be a rambly sort of entry with thoughts going everywhere .... that's how my mind has been going this past month. I haven't really felt the urge to blog much which is fine, something that I'm ok with. In so many ways it''s been a wonderful month and very different from the ones I've been experiencing. We've been four months now in the Netherlands!

Marcel has been home for just over five weeks now and it just messes with any resemblance of a routine that I might have. I do love having him around more as it's full of fun, stress and the kids get to see him more. We have been sharing the responsibilities of teaching the kids. Marcel has been spending time with Jackson building a castle and a mountain scene out of papermache.

That has freed me up to spend time with the older three children taking the opportunity to see a couple more mesuems and have more focused times with table-time. Michael and Marcel have started running in the mornings down to the Amstel River to have some dad/son time and to get fitter. We are noticing so many changes happening in Michael, he is maturing, and articulating more of what might be bothering him and his mood swings have at times taken us by surprise! I've been talking ALOT more with him and I've been so glad to see Marcel taking the initiative of talking issues out with M too. We are definitely getting closer to that time of teenagehood where good friends have told us how much more their children needed to talk and discuss. anyway, it's quite a journey!

Having Marcel home also means that we don't have an income coming in, so that means we have needed to make some tough decisions about our future. But hey, isn't that life sometimes! This last five weeks has reminded us just how much we rely on the Lord and how fragile our situation is and as tempting as it is to just go for it, a more softly, softly approach needs to be our aim for a little while to come. Well, Marcel starts a year-long contract on Monday so that is an answer to our prayers and the time we need to establish ourselves.

We've been plodding along with the lessons and I so enjoy seeing the learning that is happening with them and the connections they children are making with the world around them, in language, in geography, mathematical patterns, in relationships and resolving issues, in reading their Bibles and other books for enjoyment, and making important decisions. There are frustrations, of course, especially with working out the needs of four children with all their differences.

We've had a stomach flu so that hasn't been pretty at times. Especially when Jackson chooses the prime spot at the top of the 'carpet' stairs to be sick ... of all the place he could have been sick he goes for the only carpetted area in the house! Don't ya just love kids when they are sick!! Anyway enough of that and I think we are over the worst now!

We have met up with other homeschoolers for several activities recently and that's been brilliant getting to know others in the country. I admire the parents here so much with their challenges of finding good quality dutch resources, they are really starting from scratch in so many ways. In Australia we have the option of buying workbooks off the shelves in Big W-type-shops or bookshops or newagencies if we want to go that way in our families. There is very little of that type of workbook being sold to the public in this country it all goes through the schools. We have found some great little books that are designed to teach the dutch children english and have used these to our advantage as a way of learning dutch.

Recently our family celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time with three other families. We really loved doing this celebration as it was great way of focusing on thankfulness. We had the dinner on the Friday night rather than on Thursday as it's not a public holiday here like it is in America. I found it lots of fun to be shopping for the ingredients and being creative with substitues and trying to find cheaper options! I love to go grocery shopping where there is so much to discover. Now this is a new experience for me as I've pretty much always disliked grocery shopping before but each time I go now I discover something new somewhere on those shelves it's almost become equivalent to browsing the bookshops! Now, aint that something!!

In amongst the buying, cooking and organising to get all the thanksgiving food to our friends place, as well as looking after two sick children, Marcel finds out that he could still manage to vote in the Australia elections by traveling to Den Haag (a 3-4 hour round trip) .... well that didn't go down well. Not with a creamy potato with gravey, cheese ball, and winter salad to make for about 20 people, not to mention transporting all the food over to our friends house and sick kids. He just has a way of making all these last minute things seem so possible but I've been through this sort of senario one to many times and am hopefully learning that it's ok not to go with last minute changes to plans. :-)

Michelle xxx

Living in the Northern Hemisphere is still such a new experience with the seasons being opposite to what I'm used too. Little things that amuse me include, over the weekend Canberra lost an hour by going into day-light saving time. Whereas, here in the Netherlands we gained an hour! That extra hour was very nice too, BTW! The upshot was, that instead of an 8 hour difference between Amsterdam and Canberra, there is now a 10 hour difference. And just that little change is making the world of diffence with contacting family and friends back home. A little aside: North Queensland doesn't go to day-light saving time so there is a 9 hour difference between there and here. North Queenslanders are such radicals!

Jeannies blog entry "you are a great mom" came to my attention tonight. Lately I have so enjoyed her perspective and I love the way she encourages me to keep at this mum thing and this homeschooling thing. Not that I think I'm a great 'mom', or how we would say it in Australia, 'a great mum', but I so agree with the sentiment that 'we all have something special to bring to the table'. And each family is so uniquely special and with that specialness comes unique opportunities. Now that's something to celebrate!

Happy faces! That was the look that the kids had on their dials yesterday. I had finally got around to joining the children up on Mathletics (an online Australian-based maths site) so yesterday was spent playing and familiarising ourselves with how the site works. Needless to say, the kids enjoyed themselves and mum was happy too.

I was encouraged to see where they showed up in their 'school' grade levels, seeing how well the kiddos went yesterday being one of the reassurances for me that when 'life' happens to disrupt the academic side of our homeschool the life-learning kicks in and carries the children along in their learning. I know, I know! This is something that the Lord and experience has demonstrated to me again and again that life-learning with my children is something to embrace and value .......  (hasn't the last five years of home education taught ME anything) ......, and so, my concerns have been put aside (again) and we continue on into our new 'school' year with a new maths program and suppliments from other more paper-based resources.

Don't you just love The Homeschool Minute! I do! Each week it pops into my inbox and it's short and sweet and packed with lots of good encouragement. If you haven't already check it out ..... it's FREE. And Ruth Beechick is a weekly contributor and the other mum's are great and then there is The Family Man, he's pretty good too ~ did I mention already that's it's free!

Last weekend I bought myself a teachers record book. There's nothing special about it, not really. Over the last week I've been pulling together all the 'seeable' work that we have been doing since the beginning of the year. I haven't been relying on my memory at all. Only looking at work that I can varify by pages signed off by me, photos, or a project completed. The only records I haven't put in there is the learning that I've recorded here on my blog. That will have to wait for another time.

I've been in this place before, a few times now, where I've been out of the habit of recording our learning and journaling what the children have been doing. When I don't record I am eventually left feeling like we aren't getting anywhere. This time has been slightly different in that i've been blogging so the reminder has been there as I go back over the past couple of months of entries and piccies. Anyway, I've had THAT feeling of dissatisfaction with what I am perceiving we aren't doing. That I'm not doing enough AGAIN! Most of you probably know where I'm coming from with this.

So in pulling together all the children's work into one record book I am looking at some solid work. The learning has come in various forms: workbooks, read alouds (Bible and Chronicles of Narnia being the main-stay), excursions, progressing through Phonics Pathways, discussions, television programs, DVDs, copywork, building relationships, life experiences like moving to a foriegn country, life in the tropics, nature study from great books and real life, learning a different language, building with lego, creative play, learning to knit with Grandma and sewing with Oma. And that's only the learning that I've recorded and/or observed. God is the only one who knows about the other learning that is inevitably going on.

My Rose Of Sharon

I was living in an empty desert with no meaning to my life, Then one day I found this beautiful Rose of Sharon, who is the living Christ. And this lovely Rose forever blooms; Its sweet fragrance has filled all my rooms. It has no thorns; they've all been taken away, I know this Rose is here to stay. It brightens all my days, and is my dearest friend. On this never changing Rose I can trust and depend. This divine Rose of Sharon is so perfect and fair, And it brings me peace, and love, and joy beyond compare. Such a calm content feeling it sends, Each heartache and pain it always mends. I know in this life perfection I will never attain, But since this Rose has left it's fragrance on me, I have never been the same, And as I share this fragrance with those in need I see, This beautiful Rose of Sharon will bloom in me. Evelyn Locke Irvin

Today, I was asked how we approach our homeschooling. This is such huge question and today it was a most welcomed one. My response was that we are eclectic in our approach. On thinking later about what I had said there was so much more I could have added! Hmmm, and what does being eclectic mean anyway?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines 'eclectic' as: selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles

Uhhhhh yes, but how does that definition relate to how we as a family homeschool?? Ideally what Marcel and I have attempted to do with the education of our children is look at our children, the people that God has given us for a short time, as individuals. Then discovering and finding those methods of parenting and styles of learning that best suit the individual and use what works.

Below is what we have come up with so far as ‘the best’ for our family.

We try to put the Bible first in all that we do. Marcel once said to me that “the Bible is the glue that holds our homeschooling together”. So even though we fail as imperfect parents to do this many times, that is what we aim for in our journey with the children. They see our warts and all. Maybe through our failures, changes and wins they will get a fuller picture of their perfect Father in heaven who is graceful, forgiving and merciful.

Relationship is important to us! Do to others as you would have them do to you is a high ideal that God wants from His people. And all those other ‘one another’ (love one another) scriptures that are mentioned in the Bible too. Time is an important ingredient when is comes to learning about and practicing our relationships. First and foremost, there is our relationship with God. Then there are the relationships within the family and those outside the family.

Living and learning with the end in mind. This principle has moved up the ladder recently for us with its importance! We have been asking ourselves the question of what sort of adults do we want our children to be. Until recently our answers have been fairy-floss answers without much substance but there has been an ongoing discussion between the two of us about where we are headed in our parenting and how are we going to get there. Both of us are realizing that in order for us to go the distance we need to be clear and concise about the end result.  This will keep us focused on the task of raising children to their Godly potential.

Our children are individuals. Well yeah, that’s pretty obvious you might be thinking! And yet we as parents generally stray back to what suits us or what we’ve always known or what we feel more comfortable with. My journey is to know and relate to my children as best as I can so that I can better know their strengths and weaknesses. Only then am I in the best position to encourage them in their strengths and help them with their weaknesses. As many of you already know how much of a challenge this can be because it is very much intertwined with the ‘know thyself’ idea. When we bring our children’s strengths and weaknesses to the table we are also bringing our own to the table too!

Marcel and I are keen to teach our children life skills. Again this is our long-term aim that our children will participate in life fully and completely in ways that glorify God. Our hope is that one day they will take on this goal too, a personal commitment of their own making. Our definition of life skills covers these general areas: spiritual, academics, finances, health & hygiene, communication, service to others, love of learning and discovery etc (a TBC list!).

If you made it this far I’m impressed!! For those of you who know me well you will probably understand that this post is a result of a recent down-time with homeschooling. Coming out the other end with newer understanding is certainly a peaceful place to be!

Ahhhh, and all because of a timely question!

Something I've been wondering is how do those of you who blog manage to keep up with all their friends blogs. Leaving comments to new entries almost instanteously?? Well, now I'm in the know too! Feed Readers are these great little, downloadable, FREE software that allows you to quickly, easily keep up-to-date with friend's blogs!

When I'm not feeling overwhelmed by technology, I continue to be amazed at the cleverness of people and what they make available for free out there in internet-world!

Hello everyone,

Well, we have had it confirmed that Marcel's dad Henk has an aggresively growing cancer in his lungs. He is also suffering from Emphysema. We wil be flying back to Cairns, Queensland to spend as much time with Henk and family as we can. As I know you can image it is a sad time for us. The company that Marcel is contracting for has been so supportive as we have worked through the best thing to do. So please continue to keep an eye on my blog as there will updates coming through. And we are relieved that we have no regrets about the timing as we believe that this is all happening for a reason and we continue to trust in God and His ability to help us through.

love from the vdBs

As you can see I have some catching up to do with my Blog. Something that I hope to do over the coming weeks. So much has happened just in the past 2 weeks that it makes my head spin let alone what's been happening since mid November my last bog entry (as I update I'll try to put them in chronological order .

The biggest news!! We begin our new Overseas adventure on the 19th January 2007. Flying out of Sydney we get into Amsterdam Saturday 20th. Marcel has a 6 month contract working in the Netherlands. We still can't believe it but it becomes more real as we pack up our belongs for storage, book airplane tickets and plan to say goodbye to our dear family and friends here in Australia.

Despite the hectic pace I'm feeling surprisingly relaxed and on top of things. Goes to show that the past 2 years of planning is paying off big time. We are so excited about this change and anticipating the culture shock and wanting a complete change to our Aussie lifestyle. We have so much we want to see and experience! What a blessing to be able to do it this way by savouring a whole different world over a longer period of time.

Will keep you posted as we go along ...... love Shelso xxx