A creative week helps youngsters to look back

SCHOOLCHILDREN are being helped to understand how the First World World War affected local people in an imaginative event at a city church.

Five schools have been visiting St Mary Magdalen Church, in Knighton, this week, leading up to Remembrance Sunday.

About 300 children will take part throughout the week in craft workshops, studying the lives of local servicemen who fought in the war, exploring artefacts from the past and sowing poppy seeds.

The children have had an opportunity to see an exhibition of local history showing how Knighton has changed during the past 100 years.

Names on the war memorial acted as a guide to understanding the price of war and peace and students made this more personal through learning where these individuals lived and why it is important to remember and honour them.

Craft workshops helped students learn through activities such as making clay candle holders to designing stained glass windows on the themes of war, peace and remembrance. Children were able to take part in actions to commemorate and reflect on why remembrance has different resonances depending on personal experiences and stories.

Youngsters have also made a biplane model from pegs and lolly sticks and created a remembrance collage.

Each child will take home some of their crafts but will display some of their art in church, as part of the weeklong exhibition. The final act of remembrance will involve sowing poppy seeds in the churchyard as an acknowledgement to Flanders Fields.

This programme is one of many events provided by Knighton’s two Anglican churches, St Mary Magdalen and St Guthlac, culminating in The Price of Peace, a son et lumière presentation on Armistice Day, this Sunday, commemorating the lives of the young men of Knighton who went to war and did not return.