Kindergarten students send love to veterans

While the COVID-19 pandemic is keeping most schools from having their Veterans Day events, students at the Poplar Bluff Kindergarten Center did something different.

Mary Jayne Bader, quartermaster with the Wappapello VFW Post, worked with art teacher Fawn Luecke for students to provide veterans with artwork for the holiday.

Bader said the idea came up during a VFW meeting when it was shared that those who live in veterans homes aren’t getting out much, and even more so with most schools not accepting visitors because of the virus.

Kindergarten center students pose with Commander Charlie Hoffman and Quartermaster Mary Jayne Bader with the Wappapello VFW Post and art teacher Fawn Luecke with a Veterans Day poster the students helped make.DAR/Michael Shine

Bader said she knew Luecke, who jumped right onto the idea of sending these veterans drawings from the students.

She found about eight coloring sheets students could pick from and most of the drawings come from those. However, some students also took blank sheets of paper and colored those.

“The boys who were more military oriented, wanted to show the battlefield with the soldiers, and then, the girls seem to be more ‘thank you,’ hearts, ‘we appreciate what you’re doing,’” she said.

These kinds of pieces, Bader said, mean a lot to the people who are serving and veterans.

“I know how much it meant when I was in Iraq, and we would get a letter,” Bader said. “It means a lot.”

Despite the young age, Luecke said, the students have some understanding of what these mean to the people they’re going to. In the past, the students have gone to the VA to sing Christmas carols and hand out cards.

“Some of them will cry; some of them will hug them, and they see how much it means to them,” she said, “You can see how much it means to the kids to make them happy.”

The kindergarten center teaches the idea of filling people’s buckets, Principal Jessica Thurston said. Doing projects like this plays into that idea.

The bucket filler program, she said, teaches children about how being kind to others and not being mean helps to fill their bucket with good things.

“That’s how we presented it,” she said. “When we make cards for veterans ... we present it as ‘we’re going to fill somebody’s bucket’ that maybe doesn’t have family or little kids around.

“They understand that part of it. They just knew they were doing something very kind for somebody else.”

Along with the art project, students learned about what the military is and what veterans do for the county.

Luecke said she’s hoping this becomes a tradition for the kindergarten center to send drawings to veterans on Veterans Day.

Bader picked up the more than 350 drawings Monday morning.

She said some will go to the residents at the John J. Pershing VA Medical Center here in Poplar Bluff, along with a sign the students helped make.

The rest will go to the Missouri Veterans Home in Cape Girardeau, which has about 88 residents.

She also worked with the Greenville R-II schools and was picking up drawings from there as well.

“They’re going to put them on their doors,” she said. “They’re going to be really excited.”