Mike James
The Independent
CATLETTSBURG —
The three children at one table in Bethany Hale’s kindergarten classroom all painted the twin towers in chocolate brown acrylic with double rows of dots representing windows.
The images, chilling in their iconic familiarity, held a touching youthful innocence. The 5-year-old artists had composed in classic kid style, with blazing sun in an azure sky and daubs of green grass at street level.
Assisted by mentors from the fifth grade, the children added decorative and symbolic touches, like a red heart floating between the buildings in memory of the souls lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
Hale’s pupils, along with kindergartners in Kari Crowe’s and Susan Biggs’ classes, were painting tiles for a 9-11 memorial ceremony at Ponderosa Elementary today. The plan is to hang the tiles from the fence at the border of school property as a community memorial.
The project was born when the three kindergarten teachers, along with some other faculty members, took a pleasure trip to New York over the summer. Their tour bus paused in front of a 9-11 memorial that included tiles painted by schoolchildren to work through their own feelings about the attack.
“When we saw it, the light bulbs started to go off,” Hale said. “I looked over at the girls and said, ‘We have to do this.’”
The display struck the teachers as an effective way to introduce young minds to a pivotal episode in history, and to share it with the community. The memorial tiles will be plainly visible to traffic going by the school.
The children painting the World Trade Center towers were Justin Smith, Townes Young and Dakota Thompson. They were assisted by Haylee Gard and Lyndzie Helms.
“It was such a big event in history, it was so tragic, everybody should know about it,” Lyndzie said.
“But we need to be gentle about how we say it,” she added, pointing to the three little ones with their brushes and frowns of concentration. “We don’t want to scare them.”
Fifth-graders are old enough to help kindergartners learn about 9-11, said Haylee, who is confident she is up to the job. “I play school all the time at home,” she said. “I have little cousins and a little sister who always wants to play school.”
The entire school is studying the attack this week. When Hale asks her pupils what makes the United States special, they talk about peace, love, hope, respect and freedom.
Invited guests at the ceremony today included active-duty members of the military and the Boyd County High School ROTC and from them the teachers want children to learn respect for the U.S. flag.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2652.
