Cookie Moon

There is a customary air of lightness at Friday morning meetings, and yesterday was no exception. Melting snow and a clear blue sky outside added to a collective feeling of relief and release inside the classroom. We began – as always – with updating our wall calendar by adding the date and the weekend dates for good measure, changing the day of the week, noting the year, and announcing all of this loudly (including the Year of the Ox) courtesy of the Calendar Helper.

Next, our Meteorologist gave us an unusually spot on weather report that surprised even him. “Cold, windy, and sunny,” he reported, pointing to said pictures. “Hey! I think I kind of matched it with what’s outside today! he beamed proudly.

This had me wondering about his purpose as weather helper the other four days this week.

“Great job!”

Moving right along brought us to our daily moon watch. I expertly moved our construction paper tracking arrow to the photo of the moon for March 5th. “This is what our moon will look like tonight,” I informed. “We have been saying a waning gibbous moon all week because the moon is showing LESS each night, but it is still ROUNDish in shape, and the word gibbous means round. But, look at this boys and girls!” I went on, “Tonight our moon will look like a half a moon!” I exclaimed.

To make matters a bit more befuddling, I continued. “However, we don’t call it a half moon, we call it a quarter moon.” At this point I deftly decided that my seven-year-olds really did not care to hear my explanation about why a half moon is not called a “half moon,” but a quarter moon. I went on, “So, we say that the moon will be a quarter moon, and given our weather report, we may be lucky enough to see it tonight,” I concluded.

“It’s a cookie moon,” offered a student.

“It’s what?”

“It’s a cookie moon (emphatically)! It doesn’t look like money – money is round! It looks like a cookie – it’s a Black and White cookie”.

I grinned in astonishment.

She was right.

It was a metaphor of astounding beauty, slicing through my confounding gibberish. Even better, it was sheer poetry to a demographic that counts cookies as its own food group.

It is not a quarter moon, it’s a Cookie Moon.

We will remember it – that better way – from now on.