A local elementary school student, Kelly Kwochka, earned special mention in a national Celebrate Canada Poetry Contest, receiving the Certificate of Merit from Ed Komarnicki, MP for Souris-Moose Mountain.

Kwochka will be going into Grade 3 at Assiniboia Park Elementary School this fall. He is the son of Bruce and Tammy Kwochka. "I had a lot of fun creating the poem," said Kelly, "It was really exciting to learn that I had received this award."

It had been Shelley Glab, Grade 2 teacher at APES, who had submitted Kwochka's poem into the competition. His whole Grade 2 class had been given an assignments to write poems for the competition, with the teacher preparing the class for the assignment by having the students read books and poetry about Canada. The whole class will be having their poems published in a selection of children's poems.

For the Celebrate Canada Poetry Contest, the top three places in the elementary level were awarded to Grade 8 students, with Kelly receiving special mention for his poem. The judges for the competition thought that while outside the range of prize-winning poems, the piece deserved special attention, since the poem combined landscape and cityscape in a distinctively Canadian way.

The Celebrate Canada Poetry Contest is an initiative of the Celebrate Canada Committee for Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan elementary and high school students were encouraged to write poems that reflected their feelings and thoughts about being Canadian.

"It is quite remarkable to have an award of this prestige to be presented to a young student in Grade 2," said Komarnicki. "Kelly wrote a poem of what being Canadian is, in his mind, and it turned out to be a really put-together poem that certainly got the attention to the judges in this competition."

Kelly's poems is as follows:

Canada is
caribou migrating through the north,
garter snakes hiding under rocks,
moose walking tall on the prairies.
Canada is
fireworks exploding in the air,
sky scrapers reaching the clouds,
towers looking down on the cities.
Canada is
water drifting downhill,
mountains covering the sun,
forests close to the town.
Canada is cool!