Throughout New Zealand, 2,500 schools are using special kits to create their own Field of Remembrance for Anzac Day. Each kit contains white crosses and labels bearing the names of soldiers and nurses who died in WW1.
Soar helped the Fields of Remembrance Trust with printing for the kits, which were supplied to schools earlier this year.
The purpose of the Fields of Remembrance exercise is to help a new generation of Kiwis forge a personal connection with the New Zealanders who died in WW1. Every cross carries the name of a real person and kits have been carefully compiled so that schools receive crosses representing people from their region. There are 30 crosses in each kit, because that was the number of soldiers in an infantry platoon.
“A hundred years ago more than 18,000 New Zealand men and women fell in battle and are buried in faraway places. This project is a symbolic way to bring them all home”, says Graham Gibson, President of the Auckland RSA.
Teachers are using the Fields of Remembrance exercise as a foundation for learning about New Zealand’s involvement in WW1. Students are tasked with investigating the life and experiences of one person using resources such as the Online Cenotaph and National Library.
When schools lay their field, they are encouraged to conduct a remembrance ceremony that incorporates The Last Post bugle call and reading of this poem by Lawrence Binyon:
The Ode
They shall grow not old,
as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
We will remember them.
Visit the Fields of Remembrance website.
An example of the white crosses that schools are using to set up Fields of Remembrance.
Every cross in a Field of Remembrance is unique, representing a New Zealander who was killed in WW1.
Samuel Marsden Collegiate School for Girls with their Field of Remembrance.
