As we are moving into the new trimester, we revisited our "Hopes and Dreams" from the beginning of the year and noticed that most of them have already been met.  We talked a bit about increased expectations as we progress through the school year and children worked on new "Hopes and Dreams".  While not all of these are academic in nature, as we took down the old ones we were struck by the change in both students' art work and their ability to write.  It is very motivating to pause and  reflect on our progress so far.

"I want to count to one hundred."

"I hope to sled with my class."

"I want to learn new letter sounds."

There has been a flurry of puzzle activity recently, and with such a small group we have enough table space to leave puzzles out and complete them over several days.  With this in mind I recently ordered several new, more challenging puzzles.  Working on puzzles is a wonderful way to work as a team and build spatial relations.

We are fortunate enough to have a bird feeder right outside one of our windows and it is fun to check in on the visitors (mostly birds) throughout the day.  To help maintain this interest we made a chart of the birds we've seen and children are keeping track of them by adding tallies to the chart, a great math skill that teaches them to see numbers in groups of five and ten.  On our first day we filled the space for chickadees with 37 tallies (based on their size I'm guessing some are spending most of the day at the feeder and getting tallied multiple times!).  We have now moved onto  a bigger chart. Chickadees and gold finches seem to be the most common, with frequent sightings of nuthatches, woodpeckers, and tufted titmice as well.