Ballarat's wartime history and memorials came to life for children at Napoleons Primary School as the city stopped to mark Remembrance Day.
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For the past two weeks the school's 80 pupils have immersed themselves in the locally written and illustrated book Three Thousand Eight Hundred and One Trees (and each one has a name) by Naomi Irvin and Liv Lorkin which tells the story of Ballarat's soldiers and nurses who enlisted in World War I and the Avenue of Honour and Arch of Victory created to remember them.
The whole school took an excursion through Ballarat's war memorials including the Prisoner of War Memorial, Garden of the Grieving Mother, Arch of Victory and a drive along the Avenue of Honour after reading the book and watching a video about Lucas.
"To be there and see it and spend some time there was really inspiring," she said. "It really bought it to life for them," said learning specialist Lana McKay
"We are very lucky to have it local and to be able to visit the Arch of Victory and longest Avenue of Honour in the southern hemisphere and to have it here in Ballarat in our back yard."
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Since then they have written recounts, stories, letters, poems and more in preparation for their first Writers Festival and Remembrance Day.
"We had seen a bit of a slump in some of the (writing) results and had seen some other schools have a Writers Festival to inspire their students so we decided to hold one and everything just snowballed," Ms McKay said.
The project branched out even further in to their STEAM subjects with senior students creating Minecraft versions of the Arch of Victory and Avenue of Honour and junior students recreating them in Lego.
Family and friends, as well as Ms Irvin and Ms Lorkin, attended school on Friday to celebrate the students' work and mark Remembrance Day with a ceremony.
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