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During the time we were doing the peace project, I learnt a lot of new things in the class from you and my classmates. For example, I learnt that in World War 2, Japan was bombed. I read two sad stories "The Sky is Clear", by Mr. Yoshida and Sadako who made one thousand paper cranes. After reading the first story, which was from Mr. Yoshida, I found out how war impacted on so many thousands of innocent people and continued to do so for future generations.

Mr. Yoshida was only a thirteen years old boy at the time of the atomic bombing. In early August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Japan. Although Mr Yoshida luckily survived the dropping of the atomic bomb, his body was affected by the radiation and extremely hot temperatures of up to 5000 degrees centigrade from the bombing. As a result, he carried many injuries especially on his face, as it was severely burnt. He was hospitalized for almost 2 years to cure his injuries before he could continue studying. Then, after he finished studying, he managed to get a job. He worked well even though his self-esteem was so low because of having an abnormal and scared face. For example, while he was working, a child screamed because his face was so deformed. However, even though he was depressed for many years, he finally decided to choose between living on instead of giving up.

In my opinion, there are two main messages in the story that Mr. Yoshida wishes to give to the readers. First and most obvious, he wants peace to be in everywhere of the world. As explained above, wars only brought sadness and suffering to many innocent people and from one generation to the next generation. Furthermore, fighting is not the only way to solve problems. Any problem can be solved in a peaceful way without war.

Secondly, the hardest choice for Mr Yoshida was to live on with the psychological and physical scars of war. Many people could make the wrong decisions and just give up hope for living after a traumatic event like war. Mr Yoshida made the best choice  by overcoming these challenges and he did his best to live on.

After reading my reflection, I hope everybody can understand how important peace is and also how hard it is to live on, especially in Mr. Yoshida's case. Therefore, I strongly suggest countries to solve problems without carrying out wars. That is not only my hope but also of many people as well, especially who live on after the war, just like Mr. Yoshida. 

-Lam

During the past few weeks I have learned a lot about peace. I learned about how cruel people can be, and how an atomic bomb affected the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I have learned about sweatshops and how cruel they are towards their workers. What I liked doing during the past few weeks was trying to make my own crane. What I didn’t like doing was reading stuff during class and working in groups. What I enjoyed the most was making our figures, because we got to show people what peace is to us an we could make our figures look like anything we wanted.

-Andy Le-Lam

While doing the Peace Project, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned about the bomb blast in Nagasaki and some information about the atomic bomb, the history of paper cranes, the United Nations Charter for Human Rights, also the Nagasaki Peace Charter. These topics were really interesting and cool to learn. Even though, some part of this project makes me think about the big war in Sri Lanka, and lots of kids who died during some bomb blasts, I liked working on it.

What I really liked about this peace project is the Sadako story, the paper cranes, and the figure project. I mostly liked the paper cranes, because I always wanted to know how to make a paper crane, but I only got half way through. At least I'm happy I got through half because it’s really difficult.

-Sujaancy Kandiah

What I have learnt on this project is about Mr.Yoshida`s experience when the atomic bomb fell. Well when we ,as a class was reading this, I was thinking to myself, what if this person Mr.Yoshida could have been me? Just like me, Mr.Yoshida was an innocent teenager,minding his own business and was hit by an atomic bomb. It could have been any amount of people, any age, whatever time, bad and good people who got hurt and killed. People these days need to realize how blessed we are because when that bomb dropped it could have been the people that you love, like family members who were killed or injured . What I learnt in English class is how much a better place the world can be with peace. Peace for me is happiness. If peace is happiness for everybody else no one would be sad and create violence. Violence starts out to be something little and ends up huge that can hurt and even kill. When people do something harmful to another, they should ask themselves "iI it right what I`m doing? Would I like it if that person were me?" The thing is though, alot of people do know but it`s just that they don`t care. If everyone cared, then the world would be peaceful. But we can`t have peace because you have different people in the world, some who care and some who don't. This project was great on my opinion. I really liked it because I`m a person who really loves doing art. So when we did the figures it was alot of fun working with my group. This project also proves to me that English class isn`t that boring and that it's not just about reading a story. English class can be fun!

-Cynthia Rico

In English class we learned about the Hiroshima bombing in Japan and the effects of it. We learned that people were dead in a matter of seconds. They were vaporized and some of the people shadows were left printed on the streets and walls of where they were when they died. Also , we learned about human rights . The United Nations created Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the end of the Second World War. An example of one of the rules is : Nobody has the right to treat you as his/her slave. You should not make anyone your slave . We also made our own peace charters and had to invent 3 ideas for our chart.

Julia

The United Nations Charter for Human Rights is a Charter to ensure that all humans have equal rights. If no one has Human Rights then the world would be all messed up. Everyone should have the right to be treated fairly and everyone should have the right to a good quality of life without poverty and violence.

If you look back to the past, there wasn't an international Declaration of Human Rights and people didn’t have the same power to do something and they could have gotten killed. Right now we are more aware of Human Rights and seem to have more Human Rights now than we had in the past, so we are more peaceful than in the past. Hopefully in the future, we could be more peaceful and have more Human Rights. If not, then this world is truly messed up.

-Mathew Hui

The United Nations Charter for Human Rights is a good chart for us because everyone wants to be equal. That's why this Charter was created as nobody in this world wants to be treated unfairly. This Charter was also created when the people heard or saw what happens in a sweatshop. Nobody in that sweatshop is allowed to talk and the workers aren't treated fairly.

In this way everyone should be fair to others. For example: if you are nice to someone else, then they'll be nice back to you. If this happen everywhere in the world then there would be less racism, so that mean that there'll be less violence and less death.

-Minh-Phuoc Dao