Introduction: The prompts below have been provided to support you in telling the story of Peace Day and Peace One Day to your class. Each prompt below corresponsd to one of the images telling Jeremy’s story at the back of this resource. You could gather your pupils around a computer screen/projector to display the images. Each bolded title below links to the cor- responding image.
Image 1
Jeremy Gilley is a filmmaker. He grew up reading about war in newspapers and watching stories about it on TV. He wondered why such terrible things happen and what he could do to help.
One day he decided to make a film about peace. Then he realised that there was no day of peace. There was a Mother’s Day, a Women’s Day, a Father’s Day, an Earth Day - but no Peace Day.
So Jeremy decided to make a day of peace: one day each year when everybody in the world stopped fighting and celebrated peace. Image 2
Jeremy decided to talk to the United Nations because it is the UN’s job to make sure the world is united and peaceful. He wrote a letter asking if he could speak to them about his idea. He waited patiently and soon he got an invitation to travel to the UN headquarters in New York. He was very excited!
When Jeremy arrived in New York he met an important man at the UN called Sir Kieran Prendergast. He told Jeremy that there was already a day of peace: it had been set up in 1981 by the government of Costa Rica. Image 3
Jeremy was very surprised about this. He had never heard of it before. He soon discovered why: the peace day did not have a fixed date so nobody could ever remember when the day was each year.
Now Jeremy knew what he was going to do: he was going to create a peace day with a fixed date, a special date, like a birthday, that everybody would remember. He also wanted to make it a day where people everywhere agreed to stop fighting.
Jeremy chose the 21st of September every year to be the day of peace. He also needed a name for his project. He called it ‘Peace One Day’.