For the past four years KES has participated in the "whirled peace project", Pinwheels for Peace. While I love seeing all the pinwheels displayed together, I usually end up putting together around 400-500 of the pinwheels myself. This would be worth it if we could display them the way they are intended, which is "planted" outside the school to display and show our support for the program. This has shown to be very difficult EVERY year. Texas is so hot and dry, it is impossible to get the pencils in the ground with out breaking every pinwheel. I've tried other display ideas and it just never seems to do it for me. While I love this idea of doing artwork to promote peace, I just needed another art project. It is great for talking about not only peace around the world, but for elementary students it really helps to talk about peace a little closer to home. We discuss bully behavior at school, peace in the community and at home, they can relate to that a little more. So, this year we did a dove theme, the universal symbol of peace and all 30 classes created one bird for the class collaboratively. Each class had to use a line, shape or symbol that hadn't been used to fill the stencil. Then they chose a peaceful word to add to the bottom of their picture. I think they turned out really great.
I'm in Texas as well and we've done the Pinwheels for peace also.
ReplyDeleteTwo ideas for you..... One year, we had it so dry also that what we did was I bought lots of bamboo skewers and then, when we made our pinwheels we made them on the little milk straws. The kids went out and put the skewers in the ground first (and if they broke, they broke and came and got another one), then we slipped the straw'ed pinwheels over the skewer... added a little piece of tape so that the straws didn't just rotate around the straw. Worked beautifully, and MUCH cheaper!
Second, you could get a board of pegboard from Home Depot and cut it into long strips of single holed pegboard. Then you could just stick the ends of the boards in the ground with one or two sticks and then "plant" the pinwheels in every two or three holes? Good luck! It's a very fun project! stephanie.walton@springbranchisd.com