To celebrate the International Day of Peace last month, students at The Steward School planted more than 200 pinwheels carrying messages of peace in their own celebration of “Whirled Peace.”

Their pinwheels also helped renew ties with several other Richmond-area schools. As part of the Dr. Martin Luther King Day celebration in January 2010, Steward students visited Fairfield Court Elementary School and Woodville Elementary School to help beautify their campuses by painting murals, refurbishing teacher lounges, helping clean desks and windows and to carry out simple acts of service.

To continue relationships with those schools, Steward art teachers Lynn Zinder, Cindy Grissom and Rugene Paulette invited students at the elementary schools to take part in Steward’s “Whirled Peace Day.”

Fairfield’s Assistant Principal, Ellena Ebanks, participated in the day’s festivities, spoke about the pinwheels made by Fairfield students, and thanked Steward students for their service. Students in grades three through five at Woodville Elementary made pinwheels to be displayed at their school’s Parent Night.

“You can’t promote peace unless you are happy with yourself,” Zinder told her students, who took her cue and decorated the pinwheels, all of which contained peaceful sentiments. Among them were Dr. Martin Luther King’s statement, “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means,” and a quotation from an eight-year-old child, “Peace is people talking together with a heart between them.”

Steward students shared their peaceful hearts with Mrs. Ebanks and the entire student body of the Anna Julia Cooper Episcopal School and its Headmaster, Mike Maruca, (also former head of middle school at The Steward School) during the “Whirled Peace Day” festivities. Visiting middle school students worked with Steward middle schoolers to make larger pinwheels that will be taken back to Anna Julia Cooper School. After the mornings’ program, all of the pinwheels were planted in the shape of a large peace sign on the front lawn of the Steward School campus.

Pinwheels for Peace is an art installation project started in 2005 by two Florida art teachers.