Writing Postcards for Charlottesville with 3rd Graders
One of the activities on our (very long) to do list for the first week of school was writing Postcards for Charlottesville through the #DearYoungPerson campaign with our new third graders. On Friday afternoon, we carved out some time and got started. We started with a read aloud of Painting for Peace in Ferguson by Carol Swartout Klein and used the book as an segue into a conversation about using art and images to help people feel better. Next, we asked students if they had heard of Charlottesville and looked at Charlottesville on a map to see how far it was from our school (less than 3 hours). We received a variety of responses to our question, from “I’ve heard of it before” or “my family member works there”, to “there was a violent riot there.” We had two students who knew more details and shared longer explanations about white supremacists, torches, and terrorism. We confirmed