Spring 2010 Student Activities

For the Spring of 2010 DC Peace will be working with students and teachers from Malcolm X Elementary School on three exciting programs! Students from the 4^th and 5^th grade classes will be involved in the ‘Being a Peacemaker’ project in which the kids will learn basic concepts about conflict as it happens locally and internationally. DCPEACE Facilitators with UPEACE/US will develop fun activities for the classes that educate the students about peacemakers who have helped to resolve conflict and how their work applies to the students’ own lives.

• Each students will design individual art projects depicting the effort of their favorite peacemaker.
• Students will work in small teams to use technology so they can develop basic computer, audio/visual, and communication skills in a peaceable context.
They will also record interviews with each other about their art project and why it is important to them.
• Images of the artwork and clips from the interviews will be compiled into a DVD that will be showcased at Malcolm X Day in May.

Each student will receive a DVD of the final product to take home and share with family and friends. The goal of the project is not only to teach the kids about their capacity to become peacemakers—but also to empower them as individuals and develop technological and communicative skills along the way. Most importantly… this is a collaborative effort with the Malcolm X teachers, students, and DCPEACE!

Sherlock Homes Comes to Peace Club

Well not exactly… but just about. In the after-school program the Peace Club—mixed between 3^rd and 4^th graders—will embark upon their own quest in the Peace Detectives project. After receiving an initial briefing from DC facilitators about the protocols of being a school sleuth, the students will take their Peace Detective notebooks issued to them and log conflicts they see arise in their classrooms and in school. After weeks of cataloguing these issues, the detectives will report back to the facilitators, and the group will analyze the problems individually. After deciding on the most pressing problems, the students will form three working teams and collaborate with each other in order to devise potential solutions to their assigned issue. The solutions will be expressed in the form of art, music, drama, or other creative means the students choose together. Similar to the ‘Being a Peacemaker’ project, the students in the Peace Club will film parts of the overall process and will narrate their problem-solving journey in a DVD to be showcased at Malcolm X Day. The DCPEACE team hopes to achieve the same goals of empowerment and skill development as sought in the in-classroom workshops – in a very FUN way. We can’t wait to start investigating peace at Malcolm X!