Claudia Idzik, a grade six student at Holy Ghost School in Winnipeg, MB; Lucy Yam, a grade seven student at Bowmore Public School in Toronto, ON; and Linette Ho, a grade eight student at Moscrop Secondary School in Burnaby, BC were the winners of a national poster design contest run by the Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC).
Idzik’s creative design featured such Paralympic sports as wheelchair basketball, wheelchair fencing and athletics inside the outline of a wheelchair tennis player in a promotion for the upcoming Beijing Paralympic Games. Yam depicted the Summer Paralympic Games with a mix of flags from around the world coupled with numerous Paralympians, such as sailors, horseback riders, powerlifters, archers, cyclists and others in neatly interlaced stars. Ho’s design showed Podi, the mascot of the Canadian Paralympic Committee’s online school’s program, and Beijing Paralympic Games mascot Fu Niu Lele above the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, with Paralympic athletes on each side.
The poster contest winners will receive 2008 Team Canada clothing and other merchandise. Their posters will hang in the Athletes’ Village during the Paralympic Games.
“We were amazed by the creativity and the number of entries received from schools across the country in our poster contest. We urge young Canadians everywhere to follow our Paralympic athletes – you won’t be disappointed by the excitement of Paralympic sport,” said Debbie Low, the Canadian Paralympic Committee’s Beijing 2008 Game Chef de Mission.
The contest was run under the CPC’s free online schools program, which is sponsored by Petro-Canada. The theme of the contest, open to students in grades four to eight, was “Beijing 2008: One Dream, Becoming Better Together.”
The CPC held a separate postcard contest at the Canadian International School of Beijing in China. The postcard designs of grade 2 student Joyce Chang, from New Zealand; grade 3 student Yezi Lee, from Korea; grade 4 student Choong-Hoo Lee, from Korea; and grade 5 student Teressa Kim, from Korea, have been printed onto postcards. The postcards will be given to Canadian Paralympic athletes when they arrive at the Beijing Paralympic Games so they can be mailed back to Canada with news from China.
The winners of the postcard contest will receive four tickets to the closing ceremony of the Beijing Paralympic Games, a 2010 mascot doll, and CPC and 2010 pins.
The winning posters and postcards can be viewed at: www.paralympiceducation.ca.
