Jour de Souvenir - Remembrance Day

I have been wanting to do this "War Toys into Peace Art" idea for a couple of years now, ever since I heard about it at a BCTF conference. The BCTF (our provincial union) has a great lesson plan pdf which totally helped me out, especially with the letter home to parents.

I started collecting the toys before Hallowe'en, which was maybe not the best time, and am sharing the project with a colleague. We did not end up getting as many toys as we thought, so we had to rethink our project and how we were going to present it at the Remembrance Day assembly. I found this amazing image:

and remembered that I had a bunch of old Legion magazines from my Nana. Aha!!!



The kids and I cut out a bunch of soldier pictures and then painted poppies over the instrument of war.


Because we were doing this with two classes, we needed a few different options, therefore the dove and poppy options. I loved how the poppy turned out, with the collage of poppies over guns. My colleague very kindly spray painted a zillion toy soldiers for me to hot-glue as a border.



For the doves, we have two collages, again, bordered in war-toys.
The first has a collage of Legion members - representing "remembering and honouring".


The second has a collage of pictures the other class found which represented "peace" to them. I love the person with the heart and a poppy-brain!


Note to parents, these fabulous projects will be incorporated in the assembly tomorrow morning, and then will be displayed for the rest of the month in the display case near the office.


Now I really need a project for the Legion poster contest. I'm thinking of maybe this one from "That Artist Woman" - but I'd like to come up with something myself.. My colleague is encouraging her kids to make 2D representations of the same theme: some kind of transformation of the instrument of war.. the idea of a gun shooting poppies really appeals to my hippie background! We'll see what we come up with by next week!

[Edit: I decided to go the easy route and do "That Artist Woman's" fabulous water-colour idea. The words at the top are part of the Canadian National Anthem in French.. which talks about protecting the hearths and rights of Canadians.]