Good teachers never stop wanting to teach, and a common complaint is the lack of time to prepare and deliver the lessons they dream of. Katherine Lawrence is a retired teacher and consultant, who can finally afford the hours. Last spring, she spent a concentrated few days with the grade six and seven classes of Bowen Island Community School, leading them through a unit on some of the issues surrounding global hunger.

Working from the BC Ministry of Education Social Studies Curriculum, Katherine demonstrated what percentage of the world's population consumes most of the world's food. She used graphs and pie charts to illustrate global food distribution by country and region. To make the lesson memorable, pizza-sized cookies were brought into class and cut into slices that exactly mirrored the pie-graph showing global food consumption. Each group of students then drew the name of a country or region and received the corresponding piece of cookie. The inequity of distribution was impossible to miss. Some children had little more than crumbs to suck from their fingers, while those lucky enough to draw Canada or the USA wolfed triangles as big as five regular cookies.

Most eleven and twelve year-olds are passionately committed to keeping things "fair." The group discussion that followed this unusual class snack, spurred the students into wanting to do something to address such inequities. Their outrage with the unfairness of the experience provided Katherine with the ideal introduction for the second part of her unit.

Inspired by the Empty Bowls Project, (www.emptybowls.net) Katherine, who is a potter, had each student make two bowls. For most of the children, it was their first opportunity to work with clay, and the messy project was a popular one. The completed pots received an initial firing in the school kiln. Then Katherine, and fellow potter, Sheila Webster, held noon-hour workshops to demonstrate glazing and under-glazing techniques, and supervise while the students painted their bowls. It was a lot of work to coordinate the comings and goings of over sixty student artists and 120+ works of art. The pots could not be fired in the school kiln. It was too small, and unable to reach the required temperature. Bowen Island potters, Jeanette Wrenshall and Catherine Epps, donated the use of their kilns for the final firings. Each student then chose which finished bowl to keep, and which to give as a contribution towards eliminating world hunger.

How to do that is the third part of Katherine's lesson. On September 23rd, an exhibition of photographs will open at the Bowen Island Art Gallery. These framed images are Katherine's, taken in India and South-East Asia. Below them, on bricks and boards donated by the Bowen Building Centre, the students' pots will be displayed. The photos will be for sale, and all proceeds will go to an organization that Katherine and her husband, John Lawrence, (also a retired teacher) discovered in Phnom Penh, called "Mith Samlanh," which means "friends" in Cambodian. This internationally funded society provides food, a school, and safe houses for the homeless children of the city. On October 15th, Katherine and John will host a fund-raising dinner and auction in the gallery, where each guest will receive some rice and dahl, served in one of the students' bowls. Following the meal, John and Katherine will talk about "Mith Samlanh" and present a slide-show to illustrate stories of their travels. The culminating event in Katherine's elaborate unit of lessons will be an auction of bowls. The bowls of the students will already have homes with the people who used them for rice and dahl. The bowls to be auctioned, will be ones created by practicing BC artists.

For details, email Katherine and John at kathjohn@fastmail.fm OPUS is very proud to have helped to support such an inspired lesson plan as Katherine's.