Everyone Belongs: Celebrating Harmony Day
On Tuesday 21 March 2017, our Junior School students celebrated Harmony Day.
They wore Harmony Day colours of orange and gold, or a costume that reflects ethnic diversity in Australia. They also attended a special Harmony Day Assembly and our Year 6 students planned and implemented their own in-class activities.
We spoke to Service Learning Prefects Mia, Imogen and Emily of Year 6 to understand how they celebrated their Harmony Day and what it means to them.
“I liked working with the Woodstock girls and enjoyed teaching them about Harmony Day—what it is and what it means,” said Mia.
Emily mentioned how she enjoyed working with Kindergarten and “learning about them, what cultures they’re from and what they believe in.”
“It’s important that we can teach people to accept everyone for who they are,” Imogen said. “Because some people aren’t very nice about that stuff, it wouldn’t be acceptable if we just let that happen”.
Mia, Emily and Imogen each ran their own in-class sessions, where they asked the younger students to trace their hands and then write on their hands what they thought Harmony Day means. In another activity, they created dice with questions about diversity, culture and being respectful to others, and went round in a circle to answer them.
They also asked the Year 2 students to colour in Harmony Day paper people. Imogen found this particularly interesting as she “didn’t expect the girls to draw members of their family that live in different countries. One girl drew her grandmother who lives in Greece, and another drew her Italian auntie.”
Mia pointed out that “in Wenona there are lots of students from all different cultures,” who followed tell us that she “has many friends from lots of different cultures; Italian friends; Greek friends; French friends,” [etc].
Emily said “this is what makes Wenona great—we have many different cultures within the School—and we all love and respect that.”