Focus on Peace

What colour is harmony?

Fiona Zinn

This year, the children in Friends’ Early Learning celebrated Harmony Week between March 21st and 25th. The theme this year for Harmony Week, all around the country, was ‘everyone belongs’ and given the recent events experienced in the Ukraine, the educators in Friends Early Learning felt it was a good moment in time to think about the importance of PEACE: one of our key Quaker values.

We began introducing the concept to the children by reading some picture story books that explored peace and peacefulness from different perspectives.

This led to explorations of the feelings of peace, the sound of peace and even the colour of peace. Children then worked diligently, researching colour in the Starlight Room studio space to see if they could make their own uniquely peaceful palette of colours. Some of the stunning colours invented included: ‘mummy pink’, ‘happy blue’, and ‘relaxed sunshine’.

These beautiful colours were then used to paint designs on a set of tyvec squares, to be hung as peace flags in our FEL entryway.

The learning in this project has been both meaningful and personal. The children have opted to continue making peace flags for many more days; we look forward to seeing them all together at the Early Learning Centre’s entrance very soon!

Fiona Zinn is Deputy Head (Early Learning - Year 1) at Friends’. Children explore different designs for representing what peace feels like with Lead Educator Trish Mannix in the Starlight Room studio space. Students from back left, going right: Ryley Mission, Greta Farrelly, Jack Sullivan, Nina Logan. Photo: Supplied.

Starlight Room Educator, Josephine Sutcliffe, discussing the children’s ideas about the colour of peace with FEL children in the Starlight Room. Photo: Monika Ridge. Documented research process investigating peaceful colours. Photo: Trish Mannix. The colours of peace. Photo: Monika Ridge.

Goal: 1000 peace cranes

Nicole Parums

2021 was the International Year of Peace and Trust, and the High School Library hosted a display of paper cranes. The display continues this year with an increasing number of cranes. The goal is to reach 1000 and then send the cranes to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima, Japan.

The display was kick started by a donation of hundreds of cranes folded by students in tutor group U8. Since then, all students from the High School have been invited to fold paper cranes and add them to the display.

One of our students, Skye Li-Byrne, was already folding paper cranes at home with the aim of reaching 1000 on her own. Skye has most generously added her paper cranes to the library display and continues to regularly fold more.

The Peace Monument commemorates Sadako Sasaki and the child victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. In Japan the crane is a symbol of long life and it is thought that if someone folds a thousand paper cranes they will be granted their wish for health.

Sadako’s wish was to recover from the leukemia caused by radiation from the Hiroshima bomb. Unfortunately, she did not recover and sadly died. People continue to fold paper cranes in her memory.

The paper crane has come to symbolise peace.

At the base of Sadako’s statue in Hiroshima is engraved:

“This is our cry, this is our prayer: Peace in the world.”