In this issue, Rainbow’s Executive Director Renee’s article is titled “Education from the Heart, for the Heart.”
You may have seen the phrase “Education from the Heart for the Heart” as a tag line in some of Rainbow’s advertisements. This isn’t just a catchy phrase. Certainly, it speaks to the loving care that Rainbow teachers provide, but it means even more: Rainbow believes that we are at the forefront of a societal shift to a more heart-centered era.
If we are to create a society that is peaceful, sustainable, and spiritually fulfilling, it is going to happen one heart at a time. At Rainbow, we believe we are helping to usher in a more heart centered era by educating our children holistically. This issue of Heart of the Matter describes heart centered education and explains what the term “heart-centered” really means.
For the past month Rainbow Mountain students have been learning alongside Asheville artist preparing for Imagine! An Asheville Arts Extravaganza. Fine artist, performance artist, and musicians have been all over campus. Jon Cooley is a little of all three and he is working with fourteen fourth through sixth-graders. First he taught them how to make a dulcimer and now they are learning how to play it.
Yesterday the Rainbow Mountain Dulcimer Players put on a performance at Barnes & Noble in the Asheville Mall. They started with the first song they learned on the dulcimers, Mary Had a Little Lamb. They also entertained us with This Land is Our Land, and Ode to Joy as well as Groundhog and other songs.
It was a great show and we look forward to seeing them on stage May 20th at Imagine!
The sun was out all week, a rarity for an Asheville spring, and Kingsley Pugh took full advantage of it. He invited any interested Rainbow students to paint, outside, on paper parasols. And although the kids thought it all great fun it was more than that. Kingsley will be selling the colorful parasols at this weekend’s earthday festival. Proceeds from the sale will fund four solar panels on Rainbow Mountain’s “new” building. Kingsley’s company Harvest The Sun  is donating the labor.
Three schools come together with three service-learning projects and one idea: to learn to change the world.
By doing a good turn, known as “tikkun olam “ in Judaism, change in our corner of the world can lead to change around the world. Hands of Hope consists of a several month service-learning project in partnership between a school and local non-profit and concluding with a community-wide benefit concert.
The Hands of Hope family concert will feature Billy Jonas at The Orange Peel on Sunday, March 21st 2010. Tickets for the concert are available in our office, at our partner schools; Odyssey Community School and Maccabi Academy or at the door.
Each school will share their community work at the event so come early to visit tables and see what they’ve accomplished. Local businesses sponsoring Hands of Hope will be present as well.
We hope you will join us in this community-wide event to be a part of changing the world!
Every year Rainbow first-graders explore Africa through a large thematic unit which includes animals, food, biomes and stories and dances of its many cultures. African music was the focus when two members of the Asheville based Toubab Krewe visited the first and third graders to talk about their own experiences and play music they learned on their many travels to Africa’s Ivory Coast.
Toubab Krewe is an instrumental band which fuses the music of Mali with American musical styles. Drew Heller, a Rainbow Mountain preschool alumni, and band mate, Justin Perkins, strummed the guitar and plucked the Kora, a string instrument made from a large gourd. Justin learned to play the kora while in Africa and it was the stories of their time there that they shared with the kids.The children watched in awe, swayed to the rhythm and asked all sorts of questions like, “What does Africa smell like?â€
Drew said it was great to come back and share music with the students.
A special thanks to Andi Morrell who contacted Toubab Krewe and encouraged them to come visit our school.
