Rainey A- Cookies for KurtWow! Can you believe it’s Winter Break already? My, how time flies! In the spirit of the Holidays, today Rainey room spent the day making a gift for Kurt Ellison, the Parish Director. A week ago, we planned that Rainey B would make a plate and Rainey A would bake the cookies. After some thought, we decided chocolate chip cookies were the way to go. As George put it “mmmm that’s my favorite”. No other cookie got George’s stamp of approval!
 We also sent home some homemade paper cards today. For the past month, Rainey Room A has been exploring the moon, particularly the relationship of the light of sun and the darkness of the moon. As we brainstormed how to add “light” to our handmade paper suns, we decided as a class adding something shiny and sparkly might reflect some of the classroom's natural light, illuminating our paper moons. This holiday season, Rainey A has put together Sun cards for you! Using paper pulp and our shiny sunshine additions, each child pressed and decorated an individualized sheet of homemade paper with the intention of bringing a little light home for the break.
 We’ve also sent home a small home exploration: The Moon Journal. The moon journals are intended as a space where the children can document their moon sightings, family holiday traditions or just about anything else they would like to share. We couldn’t be more excited to share them when we’re all back together in January.  Enjoy the pictures of our hot chocolate party below!
 From all of us in Rainey Room A, Happy Holidays!
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Rainey A- Our Birthday Gift Tradition
Given that today was a short day for explorations in the classroom, Brigitte and I thought we would take this opportunity to share about our birthday gifts on the blog. So far we’ve had three birthdays (CC, Lochie and Elle) and following St. John’s tradition their peers have met and prepared a gift for each and every one of them. So what is Rainey A’s birthday gift? 
 For CC, Marley and Lochie chose to represent her favorites: the zebra , the color pink and a golden bracelet that Marley made for her. Lochie’s features a deconstructed giraffe, the color blue and letter beads spelling his name. Elle’s is a composite of her favorite color, blue, and one of her favorite classroom items, glass crystals. For each, the birthday committee interviews the birthday child about their favorite things and then goes to the Tucker closet to select items that represent their answers. We can’t wait to see what the birthday committee selects for Marley’s February birthday! Please enjoy pictures of the birthday committees constructing the gifts below. :)
    Winter Traditions Happy Birthday Melanie!Today, Melanie is a year older. We celebrated her birthday today before chapel. She loved her amazing tree of cards. Special thank you to Carola, who helped organize this lovely gift. We love and appreciate you! After our birthday celebration its time for Chapel! Our job was to ring the bells and lead the moment of silence. We really enjoyed Molly's book today, almost as much as we liked saying hello to everyone!  After Chapel and snack, Kim Keymer and Lucia shared their holiday tradition, The Night Tree by Eve Bunting. We learned about the Solstice and animals hibernating in the winter.  Kim and Lucia were kind enough to prepare popcorn and cranberries so that we could make our own garland to take home. We practiced our sewing and made gorgeous garland to share at home. Lucia explained how she makes the garland at home and led us through the activity. "The bag is for taking them home. If it breaks, that's ok. There's a lot in the bag!- Lucia  Everyone, be careful. The bottom is sharp. I can do it. - Lucia  Popcorn, cranberry, popcorn, cranberry, popcorn, cranberry. I did it right. - Giacomo  Look how long it is - Jane  Rainey B : MAKING A CLOUD
"The clouds are blocking the sun." -Giacomo. "The rainbows gone. Oh no! ...Behind the rain clouds." -Maxon Melanie asked the children, "What if we had a cloud? What if there was a cloud here (pointing in the direction of the window and ceiling)? ... What if we made a cloud?" Today we took on the creative challenge and let the snowfall inspire us.
"It was snowing and we made a snow cloud." -Giacomo
"A snow cloud of white puffy things." -Maxon
"This can wrap around here..." -Giacomo
Then comes the chicken wire to help give our cloud more structure and form.
What followed was an awareness of two separate cloud parts: the wire frame and the chicken-wire armature. The idea followed to connect the two. How to do it? Use a thinner gauge, lighter weight wire, in a thread like way, to attach the chicken wire "cloud bumps"to the wire frame. By the end of the day, we had a completed cloud structure! It just needs to be filled out with "white puffy things."
"We went up and down on the cloud." Stay tuned for more on our cloud!
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| Elle: It’s going to snow! Lochie: My mom already told me that. Violet: Yeah, its going to snow |  |
B: Where does snow come from?
Elle: The sky!
Jack: Well... its really water
B: If its water is it hot or cold water?
George: Cold!
Lochie: Yeah it has to get frozen. One time JJ put a bowl of water out and it got frozen.
Elle: The sky!
Jack: Well... its really water
B: If its water is it hot or cold water?
George: Cold!
Lochie: Yeah it has to get frozen. One time JJ put a bowl of water out and it got frozen.
E: Do you think it snows on the moon?
CC: Yes!
Lochie: Maybe?
Jack: No
E: Why do you say no?
Lochie: mmmm I don’t know
E: Do you think the moon might be missing something?
Jack: Yes, water! Maybe just dust on the moon?
CC: How do you make dust?
We took some time to page through our NASA book to try and find an answer to our question about how to make dust. As we looked through the book, however, we found a picture of a volcano on the face of Mars which quickly reminded us about our lava and obstacle courses!
 | Lochie: Look I need to show you something, its the meteor that crashed into earth Elle: I know about meteors, because I see them on paw patrol George: Look at this one, it looks like a tornado Jack: If you step in it you’ll fall in the lava! George: the floor is lava! |
While the moon might have only dust, we took full advantage of our Earthly snow during our time outside. We tried our best to catch and taste the snow, thoroughly enjoying the “snow slide”.
Last photo courtesy of Lochie who took it and helped me to post it! :)
Rainey A
 | Happy Birthday to Elle! Yesterday we celebrated Elle’s 4th Birthday! We enjoyed delicious macarons and listened to Elle’s mom read us the story of swan lake over zoom! Afterwards Lochie presented Elle with her gift, a beautiful window hanging full of her favorite color blue and many light catching crystals. Wishing you all the best in this 4th year, Elle! |
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Yesterday we also had a chance to continue with our light and moon explorations. This time we used the overhead projector to project transparent images of the moon. We then used papers of varying size and density to change and distort the light.
 | And if you move this one, you get a blue half moon- Lochie A half yellow moon! - Jack Maybe we just put one moon- Marley I put another one on and maybe there’s tons of paper that makes it hide. A ton of this kind of paper and it changes. - Jack |
 |  It’s the moon! It disappeared! It's a rainbow at the top (of the projector) - Violet |
Interest in the light projection then evolved into an exploration of our shadows on the screen. Lochie took time to center the moon’s shadow adjacent to his while Elle, Violet and CC explored dancing and movement in front of the shadow screen.
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Today we also had a chance to finish our paper suns. With a new blender in hand, we made the pulp and pressed our orange suns into shape.
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We are so excited to continue with shadows, silhouettes and light and paper explorations when we return from the break!
An Intimidate Clay Date
Today was a quiet day in Rainey Rom B but a fun day nonetheless. Giacomo, Lucia and Maxon spent quality working to create plates made from red leather clay slabs. We used impression tools and letters to create plates for our snack time.
"I builded a plate and it had bumpers and black things. Letter shapes." - Giacomo
"We made plates and stuff like and tell everybody that were playing with all our friends" - Maxon
Even though the weather is getting older, we still had fun outside!
This is the snow restaurant. - Lucia
Let's make snow soup! - Jane
Guess who joined us for snack? Elyse! What a lovely surprise.
Rainey A
This morning when we went to finish our paper moons we realized the blender wasn’t working! We brainstormed it as best we could, but there was nothing we could do! Lucky for us, Lochie had a backup plan. He went out to his cubby bag and brought back a huge flashlight! “It’s like the moon” he said! We took time after our singalong to play around with this moon, shining it on black paper, the wall, the ceiling and even our own paper moons!
 | “Let’s shine them on the paper moons” - Jack “Now we don’t even need to make suns because there is light” -Lochie |
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We took our moon light into the hallway to explore a little more. Finding new spaces on which to shine our flashlight moon. In our hallway exploration we visited our mailboxes, peeked into RRB to say hi to our friends and reminisced about our time in Brown room.
Will these catch the light? Violet
CC: It’s a half moon!
Lochie: This one is a crescent moon because you can see the holes
Elle: I’ll get more moons.
CC: Look at what happened to the sparkly moon
 | CC: Look there's two of me Lochie: Look at my bracelet in the mirror. |  |
The day ended with a great game of “the floor is lava” with the whole Rainey Room cohort. Have a wonderful weekend! We’re looking forward to all the fun festivities planned for next week!
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A Day of Thoughtfulness and Making Connections
Sing along kicked off our day of connecting. Jessica Kuhn was singing alongside us this at the beginning of our day, and we were dancing with Maria and Jackson toward the end. Not to mention, we saw Rainey Room A through the hall window and later, together, we all began "catching the light." Our day ended by supporting each other in a game of "hot lava' for our Fun Friday.
"Hey there, kiddos! What are you doing?" -Maxon
"You guys again! Why do we keep seeing them?" -Giacomo
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Catching Light Together
Dancing with Maria and Jackson
Escaping Hot Lava Together
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Thinking About Others
An annual tradition is to have each class make a gift for people who are significant extensions of St. Johns and are integral to the community as a whole. Keeping with clay, we made a plate for Kurt.
"Did you make that for me, Giacomo?" -Jaxon
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"It's a pretend magnifying glass." -Giacomo
Rainey A
Rainey Room A said let there be light and there was light! Well, not so much in the traditional sense, but certainly in the paper sun sense. We took our paper mixture and blended it to create the pulp. Following the same technique as our moons, we then shaped and pressed the pulp to make our suns.
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| It looks like pumpkin- Marley When I look up at the moons up there it just gives me ideas - Jack It feels squishy- Violet It feels squishy and then it feels hard- Lochie I’m missing some pieces. Because the sun is supposed to be on fire - Violet The moon is not supposed to be on fire- Lochie |  |
Unfortunately we did run into a problem that we hadn’t encountered with our moons. When shaping our moons we chose from a variety of sizes. However in making our moons, we decided the suns should all be “bigger!” big!” as George put it. Jack offered the reasoning:
 | If the sun is bigger than the moon it gets more sunlight for the day which makes the moon shine at night - Jack |
Thus, we quickly ran out of the paper pulp and only finished four of the suns. It’s no problem though. Unlike the real sun and moon, we don’t have a supernova to assist in creating our paper solar system, so we’re happy to take our time! With any luck we will finish our suns tomorrow!
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P.S. Check out the slideshow below for some photos of an emerging "tape tunnel" exploration. The idea originated from trying to make and measure the longest piece of tape. Once the children figured out they could stretch tape across the room, Lochie quickly declared he wanted to "make a tape tunnel!". As its progressed, its become a multitude of things, most notably a suspended train track!
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