The Peaceable Kingdom

At Newtown Meeting, we have a special connection to Edward Hicks (1780-1849), who was a founding member of the meeting. His house is a 2-minute walk from our meeting, he's buried in our graveyard, replicas of his artwork hang in the social areas of our meetinghouse, and just a couple of blocks away is the Peaceable Kingdom playground. Over the years we've done a variety of First Day school activities related to Hicks and his "Peaceable Kingdom" paintings--it's a theme that children of all ages relate well to. This time, I printed out color copies (4 to a page) of 47 Peaceable Kingdom paintings. I created this pdf from photos available at the-athenaeum.org, a site dedicated to providing high resolution images of artwork in the public domain. I cut up the printouts so that I had 47 cards, each with a different Peaceable Kingdom painting.

During class, we spread the cards out face-down on the floor in the middle of the circle of children and asked each child to choose a card and look at it. We then told them they could keep turning over cards and trade the one they had chosen for another until they found one that they liked best. During this process children began to talk spontaneously about the pictures, noticing things like the fact that some initially looked identical, but when they looked more closely, there were some differences. When each child had a painting that s/he liked, we grouped the children in to pairs and asked each pair to find one more painting they liked so that between the two of them they would have three paintings. We then gave each pair a piece of newsprint and asked them to make two lists--one of things that they found in all three paintings and one of things that they found in just one painting. We also gave them the option of making a third list of things that were in just two of their paintings. When the groups finished we came back together, each group shared their list.

Finally, we went outside, looked at the graves of Edward Hicks and his relatives, and took a walk over to the Edward Hicks house, where we looked at the Newtown Heritage walk sign. A few of us also looked at the Newtown Heritage walk sign in front of our meeting house.
In this way, some pairs found things that they had originally missed. We asked questions about who that was with the native Americans in so many of the paintings. We read the words included as borders on some of the paintings to give us clues about what was going on. We asked about what the children knew about William Penn and the native Americans. We asked children to think about why Hicks might have put these two different scenes into one painting. We asked where he might have gotten the idea for all of those animals.  Eventually we got out Bibles and children took turns reading Isaiah 11:6-9. Then we looked for which of the things mentioned in these verses were in the paintings. At this point, we let each child select two or three cards to take home with them.

(The art department of the Concordia University of Chicago has a wonderful collection of art lessons for elementary school called  "Artists and the Art: Sharing Visual Stories". A lesson on Edward Hicks, with background information for teachers, is part of this collection. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting also has a Peaceable Kingdom curriculum.)

A Booklet of Chain Poems

Over the course of two weeks in April we wrote and illustrated chain poems, which I learned about in the article "The Chain Poem, a Way of Breaking the Ice", by Ingrid Wendt. I began by writing "Quaker" at the top of a piece of newsprint and then asked each child to give me a word that the word Quaker  made them think of. Their words were meeting, George Fox, Catholic, pacificism, PJ, and hat. Then, I chose the word meeting from this list, wrote it at the middle of the top of a new piece of newsprint (in landscape orientation so that we'd have lots of room on each side of the word) and asked each student for a word that the word meeting made them think of. I wrote the words in a list under the word meeting. Their words were benches, window, synagogue, centering, and Quakerism. I asked if anyone had heard of a chain poem before. None had, but they were eager to share other types of poems they'd heard of before, so we talked about haiku and limericks for a bit. I then explained that we were going to turn this list into a six-line poem by writing a line of poetry around each word, that we didn't have to worry about rhyming, and that each word could be used as the beginning, middle, or end of its line. The children came up with ideas for the lines almost as quickly as I could write them down. Our first chain poem was this:

I am meeting with my creator today

Sitting on benches and silently conversing

When I look out the window

I can see the synagogue

I am centering

My Quakerism

My co-teacher Melanie and I were blown away! After this, the children were eager to try their own. Two children chose to work as a pair, and the rest worked alone. We handed out paper and pencils and  I suggested the word light as the starting point and the poems began to flow. Then they wanted to do one with peace as a starting point, so we did another round. At the end, those who wanted to read their poems aloud. I told the children that we'd illustrate the poems next week and put them together in a booklet. I asked each child whether they'd like to include one, both or neither of their poems in the booklet and everyone liked at least one that they'd written enough to want to have it included.

In the intervening week, I typed up each poem on a half-sheet of paper and made several copies of each so that children who hadn't been in class the week before, could illustrate someone else's poem if they preferred that to writing their own. I was surprised by the excitement the children showed in seeing the typed versions of their poems. I also brought a brief sheet of explanation of how to write a chain poem with some ideas for starting words, so that children who hadn't been there before could write a poem if they'd like. (Since one child the previous week had talked about how he liked to write limericks, I also included some information about limericks.) Most children chose to spend their time illustrating the poems that had already been written; one revised her poem from the previous week, and one who hadn't been there before was very eager to write her own. Over the course of the hour we got many beautifully illustrated versions of the poems and the children decided on a title for the booklet and made a cover.

I scanned the illustrated poems, Melanie worked with our newsletter committee to have poems published there, and we used Blurb to produce a copy of the booklet for each child and a few to keep in the meetinghouse. Both print and iBook versions are available on Blurb.

Peace Queries

I cut up this document with quotes about peace and placed the "peace pieces" in the center of the circle and told the children that they'd be choosing a peace piece to illustrate. Everyone looked though them until they found one they liked. Before we moved on to illustrating, we talked a bit about what Faith & Practice books are (this was not new for most of the group) and the meanings of the words faith and practice. Then I asked the children to talk about what's in Faith & Practice. Even though someone remembered that Faith & Practice contained queries, no one knew what queries were. We read a couple as examples, and people came up with the idea that they were questions that made you think and reflect. I asked the students while they were drawing to think of one query to go along with the quote they were illustrating. For some quotes, it helped the children to be told to think about to think about a question that might have been answered using the quote. When I do something like this again, I'll probably suggest that the queries begins with a typical beginning of  "Do I/we . . . ?",  "How do I/we . . . ?" or "Am I/we . . . ?" since some people had trouble figuring out how to get started. Once everyone had finished, we got back into our circle and passed around a small object from our centering basket. When the object was passed to a person s/he read her query, counted silently and slowly to ten so that everyone had a chance to reflect on the query and then passed the object on to the next person. Our queries were

How do you get to peace?

How do you think a prisoner has peace inside a cell?

How can we love what we think we hate?

What is the best place for dreams?

How can I make friends with my enemy?

How do I make peace with my enemies?

How can we forgive others for mishaps and not hurt, but heal during the process?

What would you say if you feel there's not enough love in someone or something?

Cards for Friends

One Friend in our meeting has a "ministry of cards." She tries to send cards to meeting members and attenders who are ill or have just gone through a major life event such as the birth of a child, a graduation, or the death of a loved one. Our Care and Counsel committee helps to keep her abreast of who might need a card. In today's class, we made cards for her to have on hand.
 

Valentines for All

Today we did our annual activity of making valentines for the meeting, which is always a hit for both the makers and the receivers. I bring in a few copies of a sheet with Bible verses about love and tell the children that the only requirement for their valentines is that they need to include one of these verses on each valentine. Some cut out and paste on the printed versions and some copy the verses by hand. (The formatting of the sheets is such that they can be printed on address labels, but I didn't have any on hand this year. Scissors and glue are a fine alternative.) Many children enjoy looking through and choosing verses they like. We've built up a stock of valentine-making supplies over the past several years of doing this project. (Essentials are some colored paper and glue. Other possibilities include tissue paper, pink index cards, colored card stock, stickers, ribbons, doilies, . . .  . This year one of the other first day school teachers had used a die cutter at her school to make lots of pre-cut heart shapes, which were a big hit.)

Since our First Day School program meets before meeting for worship, a couple of the children stand outside the meeting room door with a basket full of valentines and hand one to each person who comes in. Today the ministry was heavily influenced by the valentines and when one speaker read aloud the message on her valentine, my daughter leaned over and whispered, "I made that one!" It turned out to be a nice way of having the children feel connected to the ministry.

The Plague of Frogs

Today, after composing text messages from Moses to Zipporah, we acted out the first few scenes in a skit about Moses that I found at www.rotation.org's Ideas & Lesson Exchange. (Here's my differently formatted, abridged and slightly edited version.)

With each scene we switched the actors. Before doing the scene about the plague of frogs, we stopped to make lots of jumping frogs for the scene from 4 x 6 index cards (actually, brightly colored cardstock that I had sliced into 4 x 6 pieces). Once they got the hang of this, the children could have gone on much longer with the frog-making. (We probably spent about 25 minutes making frogs.) We did, however, manage to get in the plague of frogs scene just before we ran out of time.

Text Messages from Moses to Zipporah

After considering Moses and the burning bush last week, we started on the plagues this week. Because the two are so connected, we used this 10-minute activity to recap last week's story for those who hadn't been there. (The activity, though, would work well with almost any story.) I asked children who'd been present last week to tell the story to those who hadn't been with us, and for everyone to put themselves in Moses's sandals and try to imagine what it would have felt like to experience what he experienced. Their task after hearing the story would be to pretend they were Moses and to compose a text message that Moses might have sent to his wife, Zipporah, at the end of the experience. As you can see from the samples messages, the children enjoyed incorporating text-speak. (One person noted enthusiastically that he was not going to worry about spelling at all--and was even going to intentionally misspell--since spelling is not all that important when texting!) Most children read their messages aloud when we finished and there was much laughter. A few were inspired to include Zipporah's reply as well!

            

Turning a staff into a snake

Students pair off, and decide which one in the pair will be God and which will be Moses. Each Moses gets a toilet paper tube to serve as a staff and each God gets a piece of orange construction paper to serve as a flame. Read Exodus 3:1-12 and 4:1-17 and have students act out the story as you go. After acting out the story and giving an opportunity for students to react to it, give toilet paper tubes to the children who were playing God and move on to the activity of turning the staffs into snakes. For those students who finish early, suggest that they figure out a way to make a burning bush using construction paper and/or felt. (When we did this, the first student to work on a bush asked me for a cup, and then all the other bush makers wanted one, too, so our bushes involved cups.)

 

Materials

• one toilet paper tube per child, plus a couple of extras
• various colors of felt
• scissors
• glue
• (optional, but appreciated) a pair of googly eyes for each child
• construction paper (including several sheets of orange)
• (optional) paper or plastic cups to serve as a form for a bush