Jackson’s Work | For my children

Weekend Warmth

Almost seventy degrees in January is not supposed to happen, at least to a little boy trying to understand the seasonal differences! However, when it does, the only option is to get out in the fresh air and soak up some much needed Vitamin D!

We took advantage of the warm air to start pruning our vines.

Sweet big sister was happy to tag along with her “vineyard baby and puppy”

Baby sissy is completely mobile this season for the fun of keeping up with her brother and sister.

We quickly discovered our need for two baby strollers to push in the vineyard, one for each doll, one for each sister…notice the look on Isabela.

We also spent much of our time this weekend loading and hauling wood from the property line of our vineyard and our dear neighbors, Ras and Janice.

Complete with his gloves and wheel barrow (a birthday gift from Aunt Amy that he loves and uses for everything) he worked the whole time, never tiring or complaining. I complained some that he was trying to move the too big pieces of wood!

Morning break for the girls, compliments of Ras…suckers, Isabela’s first!

Love to be in the empty lake bottoms

All three enjoyed climbing on the split wood

Jackson and Ras. Ras always brings a sucker and Jackson likes his John Deere.

Finally after all these years, a photo of my three with a very special person. Janice has prayed for my children and our family since the beginning. We see the power!!

Even in a dark photo, I love her smile and her enthusiasm for everything around her.

This girl’s sweetness rubs off on everyone. My good partner in the field!

Always in control, always going, always determined. Yes that’s me with a look of disapproval of carrying a piece of wood to heavy for these hands!

Joy in a fun weekend

January 15, 2013
Categories: Jackson's Work, Moments of Joy, Photos, Vineyard . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Week events

Our awesome little man finally made it to the magic number 1000! He is sooo happy!

We’ve completed our work on graphing, tally marks, and tables.

We have continued with our spelling, worked on naming nouns and pronouns, completed a simple study of the Voyage to the New World, complete with the Pilgrims and Indians, and spent lots of time on Science. This is an example of creating a cloud in a bag and watching the water vapor turn to rain. We also have charted the weather and watched a bean sprout in a jar. I love that they can see how the study of science is everywhere around them, slowing down for observation is the fun part!

Abigail copied her numbers to thirty!

She has learned to recite the months of the year. We also have completed a couple more nursery rhymes and poems and Jackson finally memorized the following…

We had some fun lining up the trucks and Jackson finished the level three of his reader!

He also had another great spelling test for review week.

We hauled some wood

Raked a few piles of leaves

And enjoyed the cooler weather.

For extra fun, we helped Cousin Elijah celebrate his fourth birthday. We had a blast!

The theme was construction trucks, Jackson was thrilled.

Abigail was thrilled to get treats from the piñata.

Aunt Fran was happy to be with all of the littles.

A nice afternoon.

Hang on birthday boy!

We had fun celebrating with you!

December 14, 2012
Categories: Abigail's Work, Jackson's Work, Photos . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Busy Learning, Busy Living

Life is busy here with these three. They never stop moving, learning, or laughing.

Isabela has decided she wants to be like Jackson and Abigail and vacuum the floor. Sounds perfect to me, especially if she adds the fuzzy slippers, enthusiasm, and smile.

While playing outside one morning a blimp flew over the house..They were thrilled to watch it rise over the hill and glide above our house. By the time I was able to get inside for the camera I was unable to get a close up perfect shot.

I am so proud of this girl! Finally she has written all twenty six upper case letters A-Z!

A true milestone for Abigail before her fourth birthday!
Jackson was worried why I didn’t require her to put the letters on a line or to make her keep it more organized!

Jackson’s week was filled with checking out Christmas toys, asking tons of questions, playing off a boy’s energy, and completing much work.

He was really excited to realize he was at 900!

We took a week off from our math book to practice fact families. Last week it was the only concept that stumped him on his test. Luxury of homeschooling, we were able to slow down until he completely understood. Now we are both happy!

I had to add this copy of a reading lesson. These words he enjoyed and felt BIG completing. I showed him a time or so and amazingly he was able to read almost all of them feeling like he accomplished something really different because of the size of the words.

These are examples of the sentence breaks he practices every other reading lesson.

Another 100 in Spelling this week. The interesting thing about this lesson was I moved two of last weeks words, Tuesday and Wednesday, to this week. He flew with his regular list of words and five of the days of the week-last week and then ran out of steam with Tuesday/Wednesday…so we added it here and he was successful.

We finally finished packing our Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child boxes.

We had a lot of fun searching the stores with special goodies for these boxes.

Three boxes, one for a boy, two for a girl, and hopefully a good lesson in life about giving! We paid our donation online. In doing this, we will hopefully receive an email notification of what part of the world our boxes travel to. Sounds like a great opportunity for a geography lesson in the future!

Sitting in a baby doll stroller and loving being pushed around by her big sissy! Isabela enjoys sitting on our lap in the floor. This week was the first time she actually said, “sit down!” They are growing way too fast!

Finally, this week we learned that a shadow was created when an object blocks out the sun’s light. We had fun having a sunny day, shadow play at different times throughout the day watching our shadow change locations depending on where the sun was.

November 17, 2012
Categories: Abigail's Work, Isabela's Work, Jackson's Work . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Week At A Glance, 10/26/12

Although we have a couple more thank you letters to complete, I thought I’d share some of those we have worked on this week as well as other writing assignments and accomplishments.

Abigail’s part of the thank you was to add her name to the bottom. Notice the L under Jackson’s name, the last name following it, and her middle initial after her brother’s name. She was satisfied!

His daddy would throw the boat way out into the deep and we would watch the waves bring it to shore. He had a blast!

Love his letter and the idea HE had to write the thank you. Love that Abigail wanted to add her name as well as the sweet drawing of the five of us!

This was a new highlight of our week. Daddy’s good work friend treated our family to this event.

Abigail was about asleep when her sissy climbed on her lap and said, “ohhhhh”

They only thing I said was, “write something about Abigail.”

Proud boy because he completed the nursery rhymes Little Miss Muffet and Pease Porridge. He also finished completing all 15 sets of Kindergarten Dolch words, and the biggie, he completed Volume 2 in our Reading series, The Runt Pig which was a collection of 11 short stories!

A not so proud moment for him was not remembering how to spell all words. Many tears and frustrations later, I HOPE it’s understood, it’s ok to miss one!

Abigail has worked hard to perfect her name this week. Here she is circling and counting fall objects in her weekly reader.

Finally, Isabela likes to join us during school…especially at the table. Imitating Abigail with a crayon and a great smile!

October 26, 2012
Categories: Jackson's Work . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Butterfly! The Conclusion to our Science Experiment 9/29/12

We’ve been busy around here watching, observing, and of course waiting for our science experiment to reveal herself. We have answered LOTS of times, how many days might be left, as well as why it won’t be able to continue living here once it has transformed into a butterfly.

Saturday morning we noticed some color showing in the chrysalis so we knew it wouldn’t be long.

Abigail wanted to examine it closely to see if she could see her caterpillar friend.

Honestly, looking minutes later, this is what we found. A very fragile looking butterfly with small crumpled wings and big eyes.

Each of them couldn’t believe what a beautiful butterfly was in our jar.

Abigail can’t decide if she is happy or sad. Her caterpillar friend is gone and now we have to release the new butterfly!

Isabela couldn’t decide if she was happy or scared. Lots of sounds and emotions from this girl.

The tiny details of this creature were amazing!

After being silly on the back porch, we decided to take the butterfly to Nana and Papaw’s house to release.

Once out of the jar it immediately took hold of Jackson’s finger! He was amazed by this.

Jackson placed the butterfly on Isabela and it never offered to fly away. She wasn’t too sure about it but didn’t cry.

I love this picture! A happy boy proud to have learned and witnessed this amazing life cycle. Finally the butterfly lifted off of his finger and took flight. We watched it disappear into the trees and were thankful our cat or a bird didn’t capture this new fragile life.

By Abigail, she wrote her name, drew her picture, and copied my word BUTTERFLY.

By Jackson, he summarized his thoughts with some help on the spelling and then illustrated his butterfly.

September 30, 2012
Categories: Abigail's Art, Abigail's Work, Jackson's Art, Jackson's Work, Moments of Joy, Observations . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Great Achievements! 9/21/12

Jackson has worked hard this week in school. He learned a new Nursery Rhyme, “My Black Hen,” and a Language poem, “Work” by M. A. Stodart.
It was a review week in Spelling so he had twenty five words plus one bonus!

Short vowel words plus commonly used words, and he is very proud of the bonus, spelling school correctly.
He also completed Chapter Five, Addition Strategies in Math.

I was tickled with the work, even though he missed one he could have done correctly. He was a little sad I circled one wrong.
The biggest thing for us is that he completed his Level 1 Reading book, “Run, Bug, Run!” There were fourteen stories and many new words to learn. He was most proud that looking at the table of contents he realized he had read one hundred fifty seven pages!

September 21, 2012
Categories: Jackson's Work . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Our Science Observation 9/17/12

We found a caterpillar this past Monday. I was probably more excited than the other three because I had been scouring our fields here and at the vineyard for a caterpillar on milkweed. However, this caterpillar was not found on the milkweed, it was found from our herb garden on, as Jackson refers to it, (the pickle plant)dill.

We put it in the jar and from my experience in the classroom thought we had a Monarch. After a little research I decided we probably didn’t have the Monarch we had hoped we did, we hadn’t found it on milkweed! A Black Swallowtail caterpillar looks almost identical to a Monarch with the exception that it had a ‘scent horn’ that it raised from it’s head when disturbed, and we did disturb it!

We fed it lots of dill, parsley, and carrot tops and they couldn’t believe how big and long it grew! We had many teary eyed discussions over the caterpillar soon making a chrysalis with both Jackson and Abigail-her not wanting her caterpillar friend to disappear! Finally on Sunday morning six days later, the caterpillar had vanished!

It never made the “J” as the Monarch in years past had and the chrysalis was not the perfect green jewel hanging. Instead it attached part of itself to the stick and in a matter of hours this is what we saw! Now we wait to observe what beautiful butterfly will emerge! We’ll keep you posted.

September 17, 2012
Categories: Jackson's Art, Jackson's Work, Observations . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Grapes, Grapes, and More Grapes

Loaded and ready for delivery! Watch out for the yellow jackets!

Our 2012 experience from the perspective of a five year old! His favorite things- grapes and trucks! I prompted the subject of “delivery” and we started with a few key words. He successfully constructed the complete sentences as well as the spelling, and then finished with a colorful picture!

Once delivered, some rode on an escalator and some were emptied by a fork lift, which both Jackson and Abigail loved.

All of the grapes ended up as a bright beautiful juice!

Lucky we were to have watched the whole cycle from start to finish! It’s great being a farmer growing grapes!

September 1, 2012
Categories: About Us, Excursions, Jackson's Art, Jackson's Work, Moments of Joy, Photos, Vineyard . . Author: Julie M Hall . Comments: Leave a comment

Jackson’ Number Charts

Jackson was able to write his numbers to 100 by his fourth birthday. At four and a half he had written to 200. My hope is to make it to 1,000 by the end of the year.

September 2012, he has made it this far!

November 2012, Pre-Thanksgiving

I didn’t comment at the previous chart but he made it to 1,000 before Christmas! Now he has the idea of starting at 1,000 and working backwards to 1! I’m all for it!