To Anthony, with love

WASILLA — Anthony Galvin doesn’t know it yet, but there is a very special package headed his way from the students at Machetanz Elementary School.

Galvin is a soldier stationed in Afghanistan and his sister, Ashley Galvin, is completing her student teaching at Machetanz this year in Robin Ouellette’s kindergarten class.

So when it came time for the class to complete a unit on Veterans Day, it seemed natural to talk about it in context of this soldier, she said.

“Getting 23 handmade cards will be very exciting for him,” Galvin said of her younger brother.

Ouellette said she always teaches a Veterans Day lesson, but this year’s unit went farther.

“Our class is honoring him by making cards, patriotic art projects and putting together a care package,” Ouellette wrote in an email. “We even ‘voted’ for president on Election Day, celebrating our right to vote. We have also put up a ‘Wall of Honor’ for all of the Machetanz students and families to hang pictures of their military heroes and veterans.”

What would Mason McIntyre do if he were the president? He’d take care of the world, he said Friday.

Savannah Sparrs said she has similar plans to “take care of the people and just generally rule the world” if she were president.

Last Tuesday on Election Day, students also were allowed to use voting booths set up to cast their own ballots for president. Ouellette said the vote was split at 10/10 until a student returned to class Wednesday to break the tie.

So who’d she vote for?

“Oarack Brabama,” Naomi Unfreid said.

Ouellette said the result of the election was not the point of the exercise.

“We’re celebrating the freedom to vote, not an outcome,” she said.

On Wednesday, Ouellette and Galvin also hung up a Wall of Honor banner in the school’s commons area for everyone to add their photos to of the soldiers in their lives. Soldiers from Ouellette’s father (Harold Newcomb), to Ashley Galvin’s brother Anthony and Grace Muilenberg’s dad are among the brothers, fathers, mothers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers honored there.

Muilenberg said it made her happy to get to hang her dad’s photo up in her school.

Galvin said the students, staff and parents at the school really responded to the Wall of Honor idea.

“All the kids love putting these pictures on the wall,” she said. “It’s very neat.”

Ouellette said she’s heard from several parents that the project prompted calls home to grandparents to talk about their military service, too.

“They’re 5 and they’re getting it,” Ouellette said of her kindergarten students.

Galvin said she and Ouellette used Pinterest to research craft ideas that would help make the abstract idea of Veterans Day real to her 5-year-old students. Flag hands and flag cards that students made to give to people at the Alaska Veterans and Pioneers Home in Palmer for Veterans Day were some of the projects the pair found on the site.

Muilenberg said her favorite part of the lesson was making her card for Anthony’s care package.

Students also donate items to include in the care package, including ChapStik, Gatorade and games.

Some of the games in the care package are from Nicholas Crousore.

“His mom said it was very important to Nicholas to have games in the box,” Ouellette said.

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.