Join us this Saturday, 29 October on the school grounds from 12 to 3:30 for our annual Halloween Harvest Hoe Down.

There will be live music, a magic show, bouncy houses, cake walk, a haunted house, activities, a kid’s raffle food and more. Tickets for food and activities will be on sale for a dollar each or 12 for $10.

This is a great community event. All are welcome.

Come join “Everything Counts” and Asheville Artists as we rock and funk out, and raise money to send Rainbow’s own Andi Morrell and her daughter to Bali where they will live and work to grow at the internationally renowned Green School whose unique earth-based educational program draws families, scholars and media from around the world.  Support the growth of a revolutionary and absolutely necessary new kind of education. We are a Global Village; we must connect children all over the world and educate them about preserving the environment in a way that makes sense. Andi will connect the children from schools in Asheville to the International pool of children at Green School Bali. Whether or not you know Andi or her daughter, come and join the party!

Come and party with Gift of Gab and some of Asheville’s most talented artists! Zansa, Josh Phillips, Josh Blake’s Jukebox, Caitlin Krisko and Lotion, Juan Holladay from Secret B-Sides, Agent 23, Ben Hovey, and members of Yo Mamas Big Fat Booty Band. There will be a silent auction to the right of the stage, and an art show to the left of the stage. All in the middle, there will be some booty shakin’!

$20 (advance ticket/ $22 at the door) includes 2 drink tickets per customer, for complimentary beer or non-alcoholic beverage. Show starts at 8 pm

For more information about Green School, visit www.greenschool.org or www.facebook.com/greenschool or read Andi’s blog at www.baliorbust.org.

Everything Counts is “an organization who provides information and encouragement to children, families and educators in order to broaden their understanding of the direct and indirect role children can have in the conservation of their environment.”

(Text copied from The Orange Peel)

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!

Watch the rehearsal video: http://www.wlos.com/shared/newsroom/learning/wlos_vid_501.shtml

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?”

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.

RMCS second graders spent their third week of school exploring community on the ecological level by discussing the inter-relationships (or web of life) between all living and non-living things in the forest. In an effort to bridge the “web of life” concept from the forest to society, they brainstormed the people and places needed to make a town function.  Afterwards, they read a beautiful story about children creating their own town called Roxaboxen. Then, with great enthusiasm, the second graders created their own models of Roxaboxen, complete with village characters made of clay. By week’s end, a whole imaginary village appeared on the school’s deck for the wider RMCS community to admire and enjoy.