LKegion contest

Legion, November 11 poster and essay contest
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
by Timothy W. Shire

It was a privilege to join ten other retired teachers to participate in judging this year's entries in the annual Royal Canadian Legion poster and essay contest.

Just being in the Tisdale Legion hall is an important part of the process as the walls with their pictures and displays makes this a matter to ponder upon, just as the children who created their posters and essays must have mulled over as they set about their task. The pictures on this page were taken and placed here to bring this 2014 experience into focus.

I joined the group working through the posters. Posters are submitted as black and white and colour which are judged separately. We began with the grade one images which were lumped together with those from grades two and three. I must say, I was truly moved by the sophistication and complex imagery that these very young people had in their posters.

Then we worked through the intermediate grades and then finally the high school work.

In each category we had about ten pictures or so and just as we had seen in the grade one images the level of thought that had gone into these posters was remarkable. Subjects like post traumatic stress disorder, the collective sadness of those who waited at home for their loved ones and the burden of surviving all were seen in the images.

I have just taken a sample of some of the posters that caught my eye. These are not winners or even finalists, just some of the posters. What I wanted to show you is that we need to have some pride in the realisation that these young people understand very deeply what Remembrance Day is all about and the surprising integration of present day conflicts was very mach a part of the senior students contributions. To see these samples click here or on the menu item, "the posters."

Those posters that were selected were sent on to the provincial competition and from their further selection to send the best of them on t the national judging.

I was pretty relieved that I did not have the burden of going through the essays. They were about 500 words long and below are three samples of the first pages of three essays in the competition.

Ensign

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