Featured Sites |
PeacePartners, Inc. honors our valued partners by celebrating their passion for peace, their
creative ideas, and the wonderful implementation strategies they incorporate.
As we continue to support our partners, it is our privilege to showcase PeaceBuilders sites.
Don't just take our word for it. Read about some featured sites as they explored their problems,
developed their PeaceBuilders solution, and discovered positive outcomes! We invite you to sit
back and explore the fantastic PeaceBuilding events happening throughout the United States and
U.S. Territories. |
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Otay Elementary School - Chula Vista, CA |
Otay Elementary School celebrates PeaceBuilder Week. It's always a great success!
As experienced sites know, it is not always easy to maintain enthusiasm for any ongoing project or routine. Staff and students can get stuck in a rut and forget, due to habit and repetition, how important our mission of building peace is.
The wise people at Otay Elementary, where they have been practicing PeaceBuilders for many years, tackle this problem by shaking things up during PeaceBuilders Week.
They began with classroom readings of the wonderful Dr. Seuss story The Sneetches, in which certain Sneetches are discriminated against based on trivial physical attributes.
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Sneetches with stars on their bellies believe they are more important than Sneetches without. |
Counselor Debbie Boerbaitz and a teacher visited classrooms and acted out a skit showing a favored star-bellied Sneetch mistreating a star-less Sneetch. The children were quick to condemn the prejudice and the bullying behavior.
Classroom presentations were followed by multi-grade assemblies at which a video of The Sneetches was shown and a group discussion of prejudicial and bullying behavior was held. Students loved the classroom presentations and the video gave them another perspective and allowed them to talk about some very important PeaceBuilding topics.
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Back in classrooms, teachers continued the discussion about put-downs, noticing hurts and righting wrongs with an activity featuring cut-out figures "Bobby Blue" and "Penny Pink" both of whom represent mistreated or bullied children. Even the older kids were impacted by the lesson and were able to explore more mature themes of discrimination and racism.
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Graduate Student Social Work Interns Leila Timm and Frances Lisk work with a student showing how to right wrongs. Notice the bandage on Bobby Blue's left arm. Someone has already noticed a hurt and tried to right the wrong. |
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Penny Pink has bandages and PraiseNotes to help her heal. |
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One teacher hung Bobby Blue up after the lesson, and as a follow up activity, she adds a link to a Peace Chain each time she hears a child being a PeaceBuilder by noticing hurts, righting wrongs, praising, etc. When the Peace Chain hits the floor, the class will have a PeaceBuilders Celebration. |
It is fun, meaningful lessons like these that make a lasting impression on young people. We praise the creative staff at Otay Elementary School for their ingenuity and their passion for peace. It is such a joy to hear stories about experienced PeaceBuilders sites that continue to find ways to spread the message of peace and to coach children to value and excel at building peace. What a marvelous inspiration for us all. |