Peace Poems
Fourth Grade, Patricia Lim
“We got a note from Nita (Explorer’s art teacher) that September 21st was International Peace Day and that in art the kids would be doing a “Pinwheels for Peace” project. So she was asking if we would talk about peace in the classroom so that kids would have some ideas for when they came to the art room to illustrate their pinwheels.”
“At morning meeting that morning we talked about peace and we did a concentric circles exercise. The center was peace within yourself, the next level was peace in our classroom, and the outer circle was peace in the world.”
“I found a website about the Barbara Mandingo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards. I let the children know that if they wanted to, I would submit their poetry, but no one had to. In the under 12 category there were two poems that I read to the children. There was a poem by Ellie Weinstock entitled Twenty-one Kinds of Peace.”
“We took that as an inspiration for our poem entitled “Twenty-Five Kinds of Peace”. Each of us (23 children and two adults) in the room wrote one line that expressed their idea of peace – some chose to write about it on a personal level and others at a more global level. The children wrote a rough draft and then edited it and then we put it all together.”
“I also read them two Langston Hughes Poems -- Dream Variations and I Dream a World. After that, they were to write their own poem about peace. I didn’t give them any structure and explained that some poems were free verse. Many of their first drafts were in paragraphs. I explained to them that in poems you can choose to end your lines wherever you want, in order to give a phrase more emphasis. Then I worked with them on their drafts to see where line breaks might go.”
“I had never taught them anything about poetry. It just amazed me what they had in them.”
