What is peace to you?  How do you find peace and how do you spread it to others?  This week we enjoyed expressing our ideas about peace through poetry, literature, art and conversation.

We started the conversation through our community circle, followed by the book Peace by Wendy Anderson Halperin.    This book is filled with beautifully detailed illustrations and thought provoking quotes, all having to do with how to build peace one person, one heart, one home, one neighborhood at a time.

     

In small groups, we created our own concentric circles and worked together to share ideas about what peace would look like in our hearts, homes, school, neighbourhood, city, country and in the world.  The students added their favourite quotes from the story to each section.

               

Check out Wendy Halperin’s By Heart Project to find peace quotes from the book with illustration guides!  Peace #65 has guided illustrations for the Peace book that we read.

We created Haiku poems and Lantern poems, carefully choosing words to create meaningful patterns that conveyed thoughtful messages about peace.  Haiku poems have 5 syllables in the first line, then 7 in the second line followed by 5 in the third.  Lantern poems start with one syllable, then two, three, four and back to one, in order to create a poem that is in the shape of a lantern.  We had lots of fun brainstorming peace-related words of all different syllables and then combining them to create different patterns.  The poems were beautiful!

          

Finally, we created realistic poppies, inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s close-up, large scale flower paintings, and in particular her paintings of poppies.  We took notice of her technique of using rounded lines and vivid colours, and created our own works of art using oil pastels.  We love how unique each students’ artwork turned out to be.