Ali, a therapist, eases them in slowly. "How are you feeling today? Happy?" A few kids sitting around tables raise their hands. "Nervous?" A few others nod.

The gentle probing is the first step in getting the students, who attend middle school in Islamic and public schools in Mississauga, to engage in a more difficult discussion about bullying, exclusion, and the effect that anti-Muslim sentiments have on them.

When Ali asks the tough questions - "How is Islam perceived by people around you?" - she gets tough answers from the crowd: "Oppressing," "Dangerous," and "My friends think ISIS represents Islam," the children say.

It's this reality that led Farrah Marfatia, the principal of Maingate Islamic Academy in Mississauga to work with community partners to launch a pilot project, an art therapy workshop, to give students positive and artistic outlets to express their feelings.

"We want to give kids the tools, so that they are able to say, I feel deeply emotional, or disturbed by this experience, and the way I am going to release my emotion is in a positive way," said Marfatia, who said students are given the option of using visual art, poetry, music and creative writing to express themselves. She said she came up with the idea after a discussion with students last year about terrorism, and was troubled that they expressed feeling "frustrated and powerless."

Across North America and Europe, there is increasing evidence that Muslim kids are facing anti-Muslim sentiments in school from students and in some cases, teachers. With terrorism in the spotlight and polarizing rhetoric in the political sphere, young Muslims report feeling under attack. In Canada hard data is difficult to find but anecdotes abound, says Amira Elghawaby, communications director with the National Council of Canadian Muslims.

"Children and young adults are exposed to media 24/7, and we all know that stories about Islam and Muslims are often negative for a variety of reasons," said Elghawaby, who says a number of incidents from schools have been reported to the civil rights group over the past year. Among them were two students who had their hijabs pulled off by a teacher, and students who have been taunted for requesting religious accommodation, she said.

"What we don't know for sure is how this is impacting young Canadian Muslims," she said.