King Springs Elementary Students Spread Peace in Smyrna

From Cobb County School District:

In support of World Peace Day, King Springs Elementary School art students recently helped spread community peace with more than 600 handmade and decorated pinwheels.

“With all of the hate going on in the world, I decided to make my first lesson of the year about spreading peace,” said Merry Mullins, an art teacher at Kings Springs Elementary for grades 2-5 and a Cobb County School District lead elementary art teacher. “My focus is to teach the children to stop judging people by their cover and get to know what is on the inside.”

As part of the lesson, Mullins said they discussed words that exude peace like love, kindness, equality, joy, hope, agreement, freedom and harmony. The students designed square pieces of paper adding the words that mean peace to them on one side and decorating the other side with colors and patterns. Their unique paper designs were turned into pinwheels and attached to pencils.

“I got the idea from an online site called “Pinwheels for Peace”. I’m passionate about this topic and also passionate about my Smyrna community where I teach, live, grew up and attend church,” Mullins explained. “I started thinking about spreading peace on a bigger scale and decided to contact the city of Smyrna about promoting community peace on World Peace Day. They said yes!”

The Kings Springs students joined Mullins on September 20, the day before World Peace Day, to decorate the lawn of Smyrna’s Taylor Brawner Hall with their pinwheels. The hundreds of pinwheels placed by art students formed a giant peace sign.

Image via Shutterstock