A few months back we received an email out of the blue from a lady called Patsy from Hamlets florist in Eccles, Manchester.
She said:
“We are organizing a flower painting competition for primary school children in our local area…we have variety of prizes which includes a meal for four at The Pasta Hut and cinema tickets for a family. Good prizes during the credit crunch. But we need a golden prize, one that all the competing schools will be talking about and aiming for. Now, could we ask you if you could possibly sponsor one of or the overall winner?”
By Eccles, how could we resist? It’s lovely to be considered to be a golden prize. We said we’d be happy to provide a whole school annual subscription and 5 home use subscriptions, for parents and kids to use out of school.
To make it a little more fun we created some prize certificates. Moby’s painting was not quite as good as the winners, but he has used a bold palette and has always taken a Fauvist approach to his work, so full marks for trying.
PS: If you’re holding an art competition in your school and want to use this certificate contact us and we’ll amend the text to whatever you like (as long as it fits), for free, and send you the new image for you to print. Perhaps our Impressionism movie might inspire you.
12 primary schools eventually entered with lots of wonderful still life paintings of flowers. The presentation night was held at the Working Mens Club in Patricroft. The winner was announced and prizes presented by the Mayor on the 24th March.
Clarendon Cottage Primary school was announced as the overall winner but…well, I’ll let Patsy explain:
“I have got one problem. Nobody from the overall winning school, Clarendon Cottage, turned up on the presentation night! The headmistress said she didn’t know they had to come.
I couldn’t change things at such a late stage as it wasn’t the children’s fault. But I did not feel it was right just to drop off the silver cup and the golden prize at the school. A proper presentation of the golden prize and of the cup was still needed even for the child’s sake and also to get you and the Children Services some pictures for your efforts at the very least.”
So the BrainPOP UK golden prize was eventually presented not by the Mayor but by Patsy herself. And for all the effort she went to arranging all this for her local community we think this worked out just right.
So well done to Patsy and everyone at Clarendon Cottage, the standard of entry was extremely high. I’ll leave the last comment to her: “Anyway, the outcome is that the interest for next year is so far through the roof going on the feedback, and parents have called in the shop to thank us.”
