About Project Peace
Welcome to Project Peace: Confronting Bullying through Art! Mills Lawn students, grades K-6 will be participating in a school-wide community art project celebrating heroes and peacemakers. Students have been working with school counselor, Mr. Gudgel, and their classroom teachers to understand bullying behavior and build strategies for showing integrity and empathy at school, home, and in their community. Students will share their ideas for standing up for others and speaking out against bullying or intimidation through messages of peace included in the artwork. Check out the resources page for a booklist, lesson plans, and media resources.
Kindergarten students (with six grade buddies) and first graders will create fabric messages of kindness or peace. These dyed fabric messages will be tied around the bamboo border of the three panel artwork.
Fabric messages of kindness and peace will make up the outer border of each of the three panels of the artwork.
Second and third grade students will be studying Adinkra symbols from West Africa and creating their own symbols representing peace, kindness, love, integrity, friendship, etc. Students will use their symbol to participate in printmaking an inner border for each of the three panels for the final artwork.
Inspired by African Adinkra symbols, students will design and print symbols of friendship, kindness, love, peace, etc. as part of an inner border on each panel of the artwork.
Fourth and fifth grade students will be responsible for researching and selecting three hero/peacemakers (one portrait for each panel of the artwork). Students will work collaboratively to create large scale contour drawing of each hero/peacemaker. Quotations by or about each influential figure will be layered on top of the contour drawing.
Contour drawings with quotations about hero/peacemakers will make up the portraits featured on each of the three panels of the artwork.
In addition to acting as buddies with kindergarten students, sixth grade students will participate in indigo dyeing based on textile traditions from India and found around the world.
Indigo dyed fabric will then be used for more fabric messages of peace. Students will also document school-wide participants through the creation of a scroll with the names of all participants.
Sixth graders also have the opportunity to participate in special sessions with the visiting artist and act as leaders and designers to add the final touches to the artwork (including sewing and beading among other finishing work).
Progress on “Project Peace: Confronting Bullying through Art” will part of the Yellow Springs Art Council’s upcoming show, “Art for Social Change”. Attendees of the show on the day of the opening, February 15th, will be invited to record their stories of being bullied, bullying, and standing up for others. Recorded stories will be posted on this blog, and sixth grade students at Mills Lawn will have an opportunity to respond to the stories directly or channel their response through the school-wide hero/peacemaker artwork.
The final artwork will be displayed temporarily at Antioch University Midwest and an opening will be held on March 24th. Students, families, and the community are invited to celebrate Project Peace: Confronting Bullying through Art! The artwork will then be brought back and displayed at Mills Lawn School.
Thank you to the Village Human Relations Commission, Yellow Springs Arts Council, and Mills Lawn for funding and supporting visiting artists Allison Paul and Deb Housh as facilitators of Project Peace: Confronting Bullying through Art.
Generously supported by
& the Yellow Springs Village Human Relations Commission
wonderful project – fully documented…! I have been taking many pictures of the project that I’m doing with the children of one class. I’d like to create something like this for the children to share the book-making process which they can access as we complete the project and beyond. A reference could be listed in the book to go to the site. I’ve been putting up a photo or two on my personal blog but I don’t know if that’s really the best place to list the ‘Energy Book’ project?
Libby