ADDINGHAM Primary School is one of five in the district who have taken part in a project to remember the fallen of the First World War.

In the centenary year of the ending of the Great War, children at Addingham, Silsden, Eastburn, Steeton and Sutton schools created posters detailing the lives and deaths of the men commemorated on their local war memorials.

Using the website Craven’s Part in the Great War, http://CPGW.org.uk the children have made information cards about each of the soldiers and distributed them to the homes from which they left for the war with the hope that they would be displayed in their windows during the first weeks of November.

This is a repeat of an idea that was first actioned in 2014 by the children of Hothfield Junior School (now part of Silsden Primary).

Teacher, Rebecca Carter, who first had the idea, was thrilled with the response of householders, several of whom wrote to the school saying that they had had no idea that a soldier had once lived in their house and how touched they had been by the initiative.

This year Mrs Carter recruited the support of other schools in the area in order to spread the idea and to make Poppy Day a little more real for the children.

In a recent article in The Daily Telegraph, children’s author Michael Morpurgo commented on how difficult it was for each new generation of children fully to realise the sacrifice of the soldiers. By seeing the faces of the men looking out of windows of the houses they pass on their way to school, or live in themselves, history is brought home to them in a very real way.

Speaking about the WWI project and the work carried out by local children to remember the fallen on the WWI centenary, Addingham School head teacher Hilary Cave said: “We researched the 50 men in Addingham who lost their lives and made posters of remembrance to display in the windows of the homes when they once lived.

“All the children in school also made remembrance poppies which we strung up in our entrance hall, as well as making remembrance stones to leave at the war memorial in Addingham and around our village.”