By Eileen Oldfield Staff Writer
HILLSBOROUGH — Sunnymead Elementary School students lined up behind their teachers on the school’s lawn Monday morning, each student holding a pinwheel. The teachers instructed the students to stick pinwheels in the ground as part of a ceremony recognizing peace.
Organized by student teacher Marissa Marton, the school’s first Pinwheels for Peace ceremony commemorated Sunday’s International Day of Peace.
”I think the ceremony went really well because we got to see everybody work so hard on them,” fourth-grader Collin Purdy said. “It was really fun that we could make whatever we wanted on them instead of having a task that we had to do on it.”
Ms. Marton introduced the event at the school after hearing about it during her student teaching class at The College of New Jersey. Despite learning of the event on a Tuesday and introducing it at the school the next day, Ms. Marton said the school’s office staff and teachers worked to organize the ceremony.
After the students created their designs and teachers collected them, Ms. Marton spent the weekend cutting out the pinwheels and pinning them to pencils. Though Ms. Marton said the pinwheels could be made with pipe cleaners and beads allowing students to take the whole pinwheel home rather than just the paper wheel time constraints did not allow her to create the pipe cleaner pinwheels.
”This school is amazing,” Ms. Marton said. “The staff here and the principal are amazing. They’re so open and helpful.”
To reinforce the spirit of the day of peace, teachers spoke with their classes about peace, though the lessons focused on creating peace locally.
”I thought it was great because you could put your feelings on it, and how you think about peace,” fourth-grader Ulysses Gonzalez said.
Ms. Marton hoped the students would use the lessons on peace as a template for other lessons. Though the International Day of Peace’s Web site offers videos about the ravages of war, Ms. Marton said the content and concepts were a little graphic for elementary school students.
”We took the aspect of peace starting in the classroom, and with your neighbors around you,” Ms. Marton said. “We took it to the aspect of ‘peace to oneself.’”
