Summer

Welcome and how crazy that it’s 2023!! Happy New Year to you all. I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and New Years. We had a lovely small gathering at home this year and are planning to do another Christmas in February to celebrate with our daughter who couldn’t be here with us for our get together. It’s crazy how quickly the years tick over.

It’s been one whole year since we did our first blog post for Barker Family Adventures. You can click HERE if you would like to read it. 2022 was mostly a good year with a few stressful moments. Jason’s dad being very ill for basically the first half of the year, our daughter moving to a different state, the birth of our third child and homeschooling Master C on top of that. But all in all we had alot of fun and alot more family time making memories.

A few things to update in our lives in this blog so I hope you enjoy reading.

Baby #3 Update

We delivered our healthy baby boy back in October 2022. It was a very quick labour and we have been taking it easy and loving being a family of five. I will do a seperate post for his birth. Just have to find a spare minute to sit down.

SUMMER: A Garden Update

Back in our last blog I shared our garden preparation which you can read about HERE. We ended up hiring a small rotary hoe for the day to make it easier on Jason and quicker. We dug in a mix of seaweed and manure along with a sprinkle of rapid raiser and our beds were soon ready to plant out. We have already started to harvest potato’s from our first patch which has saved us money already. Looking forward to the rest of our crops flourishing.

Homeschooling

We completed our first full year of homeschooling Master C last year which went well. We spent a few weeks unlearning some habits that are required in mainstream schooling. It is amazing how much work Master C gets done in 2 hours at home verse being in a class of 25 odd other kids. And the biggest reward is watching first hand him improving and learning new things. That moment when a new topic clicks and you can see the light bulb moment for him is so rewarding. 

We started out with Simply Homeschool which have a large amount of core subjects on different topics covering a whole range of curriculum which was brilliant but we have since pivoted to using Twinkl. Although Master C liked the crafty hands on side to Simply Homeschool it did get a little boring for him and so far he has enjoyed the lessons we have used from Twinkl. Keep your eye out for our blog on what our plan is for this year.

What’s New And 2023 Goals

This year I (Tennille) hope to read more. I’m a slow reader and books usually take me a long time to read. But like alot of people this year have said I want to do something different, learn more and keep improving myself to be the best version of me. So I’d like to incorporate some reviews on the books I have read. If anyone has any suggestions then I’m happy to hear them. I’ll try out any genre just as long as it’s interesting enough to keep me engaged.

We aim to grow our blog and following so if you are reading here and haven’t yet liked or followed our FACEBOOK or INSTAGRAM pages we would love it if you did, and share these pages with your friends. That would be amazing. We would like to get both socials to 500 followers each this year and really appreciate the help building that. 

For our family we plan to get out of the house a bit more, especially while we have the warmer sunny weather here, to do more exploring of Tasmania and share our fun with others. Particularly those that aren’t from Tassie to showcase our state, as well as those interested in homeschooling that might be unsure how it can work in a family.

There is alot of homeschool planning going on here at the moment. Master C has lots of interests that he would like to explore this year so we are getting organised for that and working out the best fit while covering the requirements. But it’s shaping up to be a fun year for him. 

Thanks for reading along. We hope you have a fabulous 2023 and if you haven’t already jump over and follow us on facebook or on instagram or leave a comment on our blog. Until next time xx Tennille – Barker Family Adventure 

Feature Image Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash