Budding artist is poster child for winning
Hannah Holland is very creative.
Hannah Holland watches her adopted orb web spider, Charlotte, sit on the front window of her family's house. After staring at the spider for a few seconds, Hannah quickly turns to her easel to carefully sketch out Charlotte's patterned body for the family to frame after the spider leaves.
A budding artist, 7-year-old Hannah of Evans spends a lot of her time at her easel and drawing table, making masterpieces to plaster the laundry-room gallery with her work.
Hannah used that creativity to win two poster contests recently, including one to help teach pupils about how to react to house fires.
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The second-grader at Evans Elementary School heard about the Georgia Fire Safety Poster Contest from her teacher and decided to enter.
"I wanted to enter it," Hannah said.
Her parents, Glenn and Jaci, recently learned that Hannah had won the state second-grade level of the contest themed, Get Out and Stay Out.
Hannah's winning poster, of nearly 600 submitted from kindergarten through fifth-grade levels, will be published in the 2004 National Fire Protection Association's annual fire-safety calendar to go to every third-grade class and winners statewide, said Barbara Ellison, public-safety educator for the Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner and State Fire Marshall's Office.
"It was a hard choice," Ellison said. "We have some great posters."
Hannah's poster showed a family whose house caught fire at night. A little boy is telling his mother that he left his teddy bear inside, but she tells him not to go back in because they can buy another bear. Firemen are using a fire hydrant to put out the fire.
The poster reads, "Nothing is as important as you. Get out and stay out."
"There are two angels looking down on them to make sure everybody was safe and okay," Hannah said.
She will travel to Atlanta tomorrow for the awards banquet, where she will receive a $100 savings bond and a book bag full of prizes.
"She likes to draw a lot, but she is way more active that that," Jaci Holland said. "She wants to be something different every week."
This week, Hannah says she wants to be a "wildlife rescuer."
Her love of animals sparked her to enter a second poster contest through the American Kennel Club. She won and received another $100 savings bond Saturday after drawing a three-panel poster depicting the three main steps to taking care of a dog - feeding daily, walking daily and regular checkups with a veterinarian.
"We were thinking about getting a dog," Mrs. Holland said. "She wanted a dog so bad. She researched it and read dogs books about how to take care of them.
"We decided a dog was too much responsibility, so we got two cats instead."