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.)