I bet you think I’m announcing some new contest here on Steemit. That bet would be wrong.

Friday evening, the District Youth Education Chair asked me if I could spare a couple of hours to help judge the entries for this years Poster, Poem & Essay Contest.

About the Poster & Literary Contests

The Royal Canadian Legion takes fostering remembrance very seriously along with engaging Canadian youth to remember the sacrifices that have been made for them.

Primary

Over 100,000 students take part in this annual contest. It starts around the time the children return to school in the fall. The entries are submitted around Remembrance Day in November and the process of selecting national winners in each category begins.

There are four divisions: Primary (grades 1-3), Junior (grades 4-6), Intermediate (grades 7-9) and Senior (grades 10-12). All four divisions can enter the poster contest which is divided into Colour and Black & White entries. For the literary (poems & essays) only the junior, intermediate and senior divisions can take part. The lengths of the essays range from 350 words for the juniors to 1000 words for the seniors.

Junior

I can’t show you the entries I took part in judging. The pictures in this post are the national winners of the 2017 competition. I can say, there was one of the colour entries we judged yesterday that we’re going to be surprised doesn’t make it to the national level.

To see more about the contest and winners from other years visit Legion.ca this is the source of the pictures in this post

Intermediate

Prizes

The winning entries for each category at the national level are displayed at the Canadian War Museum from July 1 to May 1 of the following year. For the Poster Contest, the second place winners, and those receiving an honourable mention, are displayed in the foyer of the House of Commons during the Remembrance period in November.

For the senior winners in the four contests (two posters, one essay and one poetry), the Legion sponsors a trip to Ottawa to attend the National Remembrance Day Service. There, the winners place a wreath on behalf of the youth of Canada as well as have an opportunity to meet and visit with the Governor General.

The Judging Process

Each school chooses how they will submit entries. They can submit all the entries the students create or they can have a school competition to determine which ones will represent their school. Once decided, the entries are sent to the local Legion branch.

Across Canada the Legion is divided into Provincial Commands. Each Provincial Command into Districts. Districts into Zones. For example, I’m in District F which has 52 branches in 5 Zones.

Once each branch completes their judging, the winning entries are sent to Zone for judging, then onto District and then Provincial before finally arriving at the Dominion (national) level.

Senior

With three to four judges at each level, the entries making it to the Dominion level have had to pass through a lot of people appreciating their work to get there.

The Challenge of Judging

I had to evaluate each entry based on a set criteria, giving scores for each criteria. The chair then tallies those scores for each judge and the top scores win. In some cases the judges were pretty close to agreement. On others, the judging was close but not quite in agreement. In the case of a tie, the chair has a backup judge just to break the tie.

For some entries, it was pretty easy to eliminate them compared to the other entries. For others, it came down to the devil being in the details.

Overall, it was a few hours of my time that I will never regret giving. I saw some fantastic work by children of all ages. Just because I didn’t share any of the poems and essays don’t get the idea they were not well done as well.

Visit Legion.ca and take some time to read their work.

Until Next Time — Just Steem on

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