Peace Festival: 12th anniversary!
This year Rockway’s Grade 7 and 8 classes organized and participated in the twelfth annual Peace Festival. The theme of this Peace Festival was Gender Equity. It was a fun and educational day for all involved!
Rockway’s Peace Festival is a Junior High event that is dedicated to spreading awareness about an important social justice issue. The events are planned out by Rockway’s grade 7 and 8 Student Leadership Team. Grade 8 teacher Kathy Collins has been a driving force behind these festivals for over a decade. Past events have focused on service projects such as assembling school and hygiene kits for Mennonite Central Committee, awareness building including multiculturalism and peace studies, and many other topics, all selected by the students themselves.
Here is a brief description of this year’s events, written by two grade current students:
“We started the day by watching Emma Watson’s speech to the United Nations. After the video, we split up into four groups. One activity was commercial making, where students made a short video about a gender stereotype. Another activity was a gender equal soccer game where students had to pass the ball back and forth between girls and boys to score. There was also a media activity where students designed an avatar of the opposing gender that highlighted what they thought that gender should look like. And finally, we watched parts of Girl Rising, a movie about girls trying to go to school in a developing country.
The morning was filled with sharing ideas related to the different activities. We can’t wait to participate in another Peace Festival next year!”
Lucas Sauer, Isaac Weber and Emily Loberto, grade 7 students
