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.