14 International Day of Peace Activities and Books for Your Classroom

 

Have you added International Day of Peace (or Peace Day) to your list of fall holidays? Peace Day falls on September 21 each year and is a perfect opportunity to add some peaceful activities for your kids into your classroom plans. Explore our compilation of what Peace Day can look like in the classroom, some ideas for peace activities for kids, plus a look at this year’s theme!

What Do You Do on Peace Day?

Created by the United Nations General Assembly in 1981, Peace Day is celebrated around the world, and countless schools and individual classrooms take part every year with peace activities in the classroom from writing peace pledges to creating peace flags or writing about peace.

Teaching kids about peace isn’t just talking about war and conflict. Peace is talking about kindness, fairness, inner peace, respect for the environment, and much more!

What Is the Theme for Peace Day 2022?

You can stick to general peace activities for kids, like the ones we’re about to discuss, but you can also focus on the International Peace Day 2022 theme: “End racism. Build peace.”

Peace Day Activities for Kids

Celebrating Peace Day can be simple. Use your morning meeting as a designated time to discuss peace and kindness with your students. What does peace look like? Why is peace important? How can you promote peace? These are all questions that will hopefully start a thoughtful discussion.

You can also read one of the suggested stories at the bottom of this post and complete some of these cute classroom craft ideas to display as a talking point for visitors — perhaps something to show parents during parent/teacher conferences.

Dove + Origami = Peace

You may have read your class the story Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes or may want to this year for Peace Day. It tells the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young Japanese girl who was severely injured by one of the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan during World War II. Sadako became famous for folding paper cranes shaped like doves after the war, and the tradition of origami or Japanese paper folding became a symbol of peace because of the young heroine. You can combine origami with the story of Sadako Sasaki for a moving International Peace Day activity.

Instead of paper cranes, get your students to follow along with this video to create their own origami dove (or grab the origami instructions to print out for each student), a bird symbolically associated with peace in many religions and cultures.

Teach Starter Teacher Tip: Pause as each step is completed.

Learn About the Nobel Peace Prize

Famous winners of the Nobel Prize for Peace include Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai. What better day is there than the International Day of Peace to introduce your students to these important peacemakers?

Encourage them to think about how they could make the world a better place with our My Nobel Prize drawing template and writing template for older students.

Make a ‘Peace is…’ Heart Mobile

Cut out hearts — or make it easy on yourself and use our pre-designed Heart Template. Print four hearts for each student on different colored paper.

Get your students to write what peace means to them on one heart, then stick on some colored streamers or crepe paper. Fan out the other heart templates at the top to create this colorful peace mobile to hang around your classroom.

Dedicate Your Morning Meeting to Peace Day

There seem to be more and more special “days” that teachers are encouraged to discuss with their students, and you have a whole lot of curriculum to get through. Don’t have a lot of time? Try adding some questions about peace to your morning meeting for a quick incorporation of International Peace Day that can set the tone for the rest of the school day.

You can also extend this to a week-long examination of peace, again in your class morning meeting. In the week running up to International Peace Day why not write a message and get your students to answer a question relating to peace?

Pinwheels for Peace

Jump on board the pinwheels for peace initiative as part of the week’s social and emotional learning lesson. Pinwheels symbolize childhood or a time when things were simple, joyful, and peaceful.

Use our Mindfulness Pinwheel Template, to have students create their own pinwheel and write words that relate to peace on the white space. They can even add their own wish for the world. “Plant” the pinwheels outside as a class or better yet, as an entire school! You can even organize the pinwheels in the shape of a peace sign. The spinning pinwheels will symbolize the spread of peaceful thoughts and feelings throughout the country.

Kindness = Peace

To practice kindness is to promote peace. You can easily combine kindness activities and projects with Peace Day discussions, and bring in curriculum too by using kindness and peace as a writing prompt for your students!

Use our Kindness Reflection Mini Booklet to get your students thinking about how they can be kind to others, themselves, and the planet, then have them work individually or in small groups to write out lists of build-ups they can use to share when a friend is having a bad day or ways they can be more at peace with the environment. Tie this activity into a full classroom bulletin board display as a colorful reminder that being kind is easy and makes everyone feel good. Want to continue with the kindness theme?

These Cool to Be Kind Hat Templates are a sure way to encourage your students to promote kindness and spread peace and love. Perhaps a class photo with these hats will inspire other classes to participate too!

Double dip activities and use our Stick With Kindness craft to get students to reflect on how they treat others while simultaneously preparing a great display for World Kindness Day on November 13th!

Spread Peace to the Whole School

Apart from being a fantastic way to introduce to your students the basic concepts of peace, this very catchy tune is the perfect assembly performance piece for International Peace Day. Be careful, it can be an earworm for days to come!