Today we continued with the 12 Days of Winter -- today was day number 5 - "5 gold stars." We cut out small stars, covered them with gold foil, and pasted them into our books. It took a (un)surprisingly long time for all of us to cut and paste and cut again -- but the pages in our books turned out remarkably well.

After our craft, we headed up to the music room for music class with Mr. Hofmann. When we got back to the room, we had a very short Afternoon Meeting (it's the 60th day of kindergarten already!!), and we read our new Star of the Week poster (nice job, Lili!). Then we met a new High Hat friend in our phonics lesson - Ollie Octopus (the short /o/ sound, like in 'octopus.' We also talked about a new word family - words that end in -op, like hop, mop, pop, top, and stop. Then we had a special visitor, Scientist Kristy (Kristy Quinn, a kindergarten parent who is also an astrophysicist at the U of M). She gave an very interesting presentation about stars and our sun in particular -- ask your child all about it!

The kids also discovered that the new dramatic play area is a Puppet Theater - and they are very excited to play there tomorrow!