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To
Cranes for Peace PageLate in April, Sharon O'Connell posted an invitation to teachers and school library media specials on the user groups LM_NET, Kid-lit, Kidsphere and Kidleadr to have their students join her students in learning about the Japanese involvement in World War II, the dropping of the atomic bomb and its aftermath in Hiroshima. Specifically, she asked that each student read the book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, the story of the Hiroshima girl who died of radiation sickness 10 years after the bombing, and fold an origami paper crane to be placed on the Children's Peace Statue in Hiroshima.
She was overwhelmed with enthusiastic responses from eighty schools in 42 states and one Canadian province. Students sent over 10,000 origami cranes, many touching notes, and many pictures or drawings to be shared with Japanese students. Each school responded in its own unique way. A television station in El Paso, Texas, covered the story of a participating high school there, and a Nickelodion crew filmed an elementary school in New Jersey which participated in the project. Many schools created outstanding projects.
Sharon O'Connell was able to share this project with students in the Suzuhari Elementary School in Hiroshima, Japan. (Mr. Tamai, a teacher there has created Hiroshima's WWW homepage and was a gracious host!) Students looked at slides of US students participating in the project and created a large map of the US with paper cranes taped to states which had participated in the project. Older students read translations of messages from US and wrote messages in response.
On August 6th, "Peace Day" in Hiroshima, thanks to the generosity
of the Skaneateles Middle School Parents' group, the Central NY Media
Specialists' Association, personal friends and family of Mrs. O'Connell,
People-to-People, Int'l., and Japan Air Lines, the 10,000+ paper cranes will be
taken to the Sadako Children's Peace Statue in Hiroshima. In this way, over
10,000 children in the US will join with Japanese children in expressing the
sentiments at the base of the Sadako Peace Statue:
"This is our cry,
this is our prayer:
Peace in the world."