Have Fun, Go Bowling, and Help Omega At the Same Time
Every year, Omega students go on an end-of-year trip. In the spirit of making sure every student has the opportunity to participate, Omega parents are hosting a bowling night, with all proceeds going toward the trip. What does that mean? Get your bowling gear ready, gather some friends, grab those 80s clothes hanging in your closet, and get ready to roll…a bowling ball.
Flashback Bowling
Details: Join us for an ’80s themed evening! You can register individually or with a team, dress up in your favorite ’80s costume and you’ll have the opportunity to win different prizes for the best-dressed team and the best bowling score. We’ll also have a silent auction
Date: February 23, 2018
Time: 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Cost: $25 per person. Price includes cost of bowling, rental shoes, a beverage, and a raffle ticket. This event is for folks age 21 and up.
Sign up by filling out this form and registering your team! Please note: only one person can register a team.
We have some pretty amazing staff here at Rainbow Community School.
We have so many folks with myriad talents.
This month’s team highlight is Katie Wilson, our 5th grade teaching assistant. You’ll never guess what Katie was able to do last summer.
It all starts with a story about how she found Rainbow in the first place.
How did Katie become a part of the staff at Rainbow?
Katie’s life has been serendipitous! She temporarily relocated to Boone, NC after living abroad. She’d been teaching English in Mexico and returned to the US to continue her teaching career here.
While up in Boone, she found out about an opening in the after school program at Rainbow and decided to take it. Right then, she was working as a nanny part-time.
She loved Rainbow so much, that when the opportunity came to be able to work with Susie in fourth grade as a full-time employee, she jumped at the chance.
Later, she was able to move up with the same students to fifth grade this year.
Earlier in the year, the director from a summer camp where Katie used to work contacted her.
He was leaving his company to focus on retirement and asked if she would be willing to take on directing the summer camp for international students who wanted to learn English.
Katie’s former director worked the business side of the camp while she worked the educational and development side, including overseeing staff.
Knowing that she always wanted to develop her own educational programs, it was a great opportunity.
This past summer, she developed the entire ESL curriculum for the summer camp, as well as all the programming. She also had the pleasure of locating it at Rainbow!
The Summer Camp: Visions USA
The camp operated by recruiting students from Germany, Spain, and Italy who were interested in learning English. It provided an authentic setting in which to learn English as a Second or Other Language, as well as give students an incredible international cultural experience.
Students stayed with local host families and attended English classes in the morning at Rainbow for four days per week, and then engaged in more fun activities in the afternoons.
They spent time volunteering one day per week as part of the program. Volunteer work is an important component of camp programming.
This gave international students a chance to see what the Asheville community was all about, the struggles people faced and provided visiting students with opportunities to give back to the community in which they were living and learning.
Similar to what Rainbow students do during the school year, campers went to Manna, Black Mountain Home for Kids to help with events, volunteered at local high schools, helped to paint a mural, and more.
Fridays were reserved as field days where they would go rafting, to Carrowinds, go on an overnight to see the Atlanta Braves, or other similar activities.
The camp also offered language courses for the host families’ siblings, as well.
What were some things Katie learned about running a summer camp?
The summer camp session of 2017 was incredibly successful.
Students from different countries experienced US culture, and experienced each others’ culture in a supportive environment.
In only three weeks, they became best friends and formed deep friendships that will last well beyond their time at camp.
Katie loved the fact that she was affiliated with Rainbow and how she was able to share the attitudes that Rainbow cultivates, including its teaching styles, with all the international students.
Activities included centering, teaching to the domains, and incorporating positive discipline techniques to students who hadn’t experienced that before.
[bctt tweet=”Students can tell that Rainbow Community School is different: they value the whole child.” username=”@rainbowcomsch”]
The international students could really tell that life at Rainbow was different.
They were accustomed to a more regimented school setting and often remarked about the freedom and support they had.
Were there any challenges you faced as you ran the camp?
Katie reported how it’s interesting that every country and municipality has stereotypes and attitudes that they form about other cultures and people.
She found it necessary to look for ways to get past those preconceived ideas and really reach students to show them that we humans are more alike than we are different.
Overall, however, she had a successful first year as the director of a summer camp right here at Rainbow! She’s already gearing up for the 2018 session.
If you’d like more information about summer camp and even possibly hosting students, check out Visions USA.
We at Rainbow make it a habit to practice gratitude – not just around Thanksgiving – but all during the school year.
It happens in centerings, and teachers work to instill the two words, “thank you” into every student.
As Renee mentioned in her November Kaleidoscope, the practice of gratitude can boost happiness, optimism, overall life satisfaction, and more. So much more.
Around Rainbow, we speak a lot about the 7 Domains and how each teacher carefully plans lessons that integrate each one. Like a puzzle piece, gratitude fits beautifully into each domain, making it easy for students to become mindful of the power of gratitude.
In the days and weeks leading up to Thanksgiving break, students engaged in centerings and activities to help drive home the idea of a solid practice of giving thanks.
All over campus, students participated in centerings, song circles, and wrote things they were thankful for on leaves to create a gratitude tree.
Indeed, students have a powerful sense of appreciation. We went to the After School to ask students what they were thankful for. They all instantly came up with life’s most precious and priceless gifts: family, friends, animals, nature.
Take a look for yourself:
Activities Around Campus
Gratitude is about connection.
In Preschool (Blue Door), they asked “What are you connected to?” This led to a discussion about how we’re all connected to the elements of the earth, how we feel love, and that gratitude is part of that.
The first grade Cheetahs made turkeys with feathers of gratitude. Fourth grade culminated their archaeology unit with a centering that incorporated appreciation for studying archeological discoveries.
Song circle this week incorporated songs about family, spending time in the woods, and the “Best Day of My Life.”
We invite all students to lead their families in a centering with a focus on gratitude over break. They will know what to do.
However, if you would like some ideas, here are some ways to incorporate a centering with your child.
Gratitude Centering
Gather in a circle. Take three deep breaths. You can optionally light a candle.
Have everyone in your circle write down something for which they are thankful and put it into a jar. When everyone’s finished, each person can randomly take out a slip of paper and read it aloud. Younger students who are learning to write will need help with this activity.
A variation of this could be to go outside, or to write down thoughts of gratitude on a ball and have people in the circle catch it and read off a line of gratitude nearest their right or left thumb. This activity can have so many variations!
Have your child say a blessing over your food.
Close with three more deep breaths.
For more ideas, a quick check on a search engine will give you many to choose from.
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. — Melody Beattie
In closing, we hope that all Rainbow families, friends, staff, and students have a wonderful holiday break!
We are grateful for all the love you give, the hope, the inspiration, the peace, mindfulness, and how you give back to the earth.
Our Executive Director, Renee, has created a video inviting all students, staff, alumni and families of Rainbow Community School to join us in celebrating 40 years of holistic education.
Below is a summary of the video, with invitations to the 40th Anniversary Celebration and the More Than Mindfulness Conference.
Celebrating 40 Years of Love!
Rainbow is 40 years old. We invite you to celebrate with us!
Some great leaders and healers gathered together in 1977 to found Rainbow Mountain Children’s School. Now known as Rainbow Community School, it was founded on love.
The school’s founders envisioned a curriculum that taught love and mindfulness, so that the world would become more of these things.
40 years later, we’re doing a two year celebration.
This is because school leaders began shaping their vision for the school in 1977 through parent meetings, gathering ideas, and research. The school opened its doors for the first time in 1978.
This year, in 2017, you’ll begin to see a lot more information about the history of the school, interviews with alumni, and more. In the fall of 2018, we would like to put together a celebration involving all members of our community, both past and present.
Rainbow alumni are invited to the first annual alumni gathering on Friday, Oct. 6th, 2017 from 7-10pm at Rainbow Community School.
We believe that getting the word out about love and mindfulness is so incredibly important. Because of that, we also want to invite you to the More Than Mindfulness Conference.
RCS has an adult education component where we train parents, teachers, and other adults in using holistic education practices, and mindfulness practices. It’s a great opportunity for folks to deeply understand what we are about here at Rainbow, and the larger purpose behind what we are doing.
