"Peaceful Friends" - A Community Building Mini Project

"Peace is always beautiful."

- Walt Whitman

Hello Friends!

Our class completed their first mini project: Peaceful Friends! We hoped that this project would help us establish a foundation for a great school year and a positive classroom setting. In this community-building project, our class investigated the essential question: What does peace mean to you and how can we be peaceful friends in our community?

We discovered that peace starts with a feeling within us, and we can spread peace in our community through our interactions with others - both in the things we do and the words we say. We created two products in this project: a class book titled Peaceful Friends! as well as a set of "Peace Beads" art mobile installations hanging in our classroom.

To start our project, we read many books and listened to songs about peace. Some of these book titles included The Peace Book by Todd Parr, Peace, Baby! by Linda Ashman, What Does Peace Feel Like? By Vladimir Radunsky, Peace Week In Miss Fox’s Class by Eileen Spinelli, Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes, and When Sofie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry... by Molly Bang.

As we listened to these authors' messages and studied the illustrators' images, we asked ourselves these questions:

What does peace feel like?
Where are some peaceful places?
What can people do to be peaceful towards others and themselves?
What does peace mean to me?

We were inspired by these books and decided we wanted to make our own book about peace, as well as some kind of visual reminder to put up in our class and help us remember to be peaceful friends at school. We decided to make peace symbols! We took some time to study symbols. We learned that symbols are often times a picture that stands for something else. We figured out that we could draw our own symbols - peace symbols - pictures that represent what peace means to us. We drew these symbols as a representation of our answer to the question "What does peace mean to me?" and our teachers helped us transcribe our responses.

After drawing our first draft of our peace symbols we learned about critique. We discovered that we can use critique to help each other make our work even better! We learned that to be effective, critique must always be kind, specific and helpful.

When we had made our peace symbol drawings the best they could be, it was time to turn them into illustrations for our book and beads for our Peace Beads Mobile. I scanned the students drawings to turn them into the pages of our book, but the bead making was much more exciting! We used a special product called Shrinky Dinks® to turn our paper drawings into hard, little plastic beads. First we transferred the images onto the special Shrinky Dinks® plastic sheet by tracing our drawings with sharpies. We cut out the symbol shape and hole-punch the top so we can string them onto our mobile later. Then we put the sheet into a toaster oven and after a few minutes they shrink down into little hard plastic beads! It's amazing and fascinating to watch! Our peace symbols had now been transformed into peace beads!

Finally, we assembled our Peace Beads Mobile by tying our finished peace beads onto strings of other colorful beads we made another day. We took turns working in groups to paint some large sticks we found with acrylic paint. I helped the students tie their strings onto the painted sticks and then assemble it all together. These collaborative art pieces are now hanging proudly in our classroom, one above each doorway.

Our original peace symbol illustrations and dictations have now been assembled into a class book titled Peaceful Friends! by the Kindergarteners of Room 140 at HTeCV. Check out our finished pages on display in our room!

As peaceful friends, we also decided to take peace pledges on the International Day of Peace, September 21st! We recorded our peace pledges in writing, and created a watercolor art piece to go on the front. our classmate Dakota told us that the dove is a symbol of peace so we make doves by tracing our hand, and glued them onto our watercolor backdrops. They turned out beautifully don't you think?!