A group of Maritime students honoured the 100th anniversary of the poem, ‘In Flanders Field’ Thursday, with some help from the other side of the world.

In 1915, the timeless words, “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row’ were first committed to paper by Lt.-Col. John McCrae.

Students at Halifax’s Fairview Junior High spent their morning reciting the poem and interacting with students across the Atlantic Ocean at a school in Poperinge, Belgium through an online video chat.

The people of Belgium still have gratitude for Canada and its people for their help during the First World War.

“I was actually born in Jamaica, but just knowing that I live in a country that played such a big role is a heartwarming feeling,” says Raheem Elliot, a grade 9 student at Fairview Junior High.

That feeling is shared by Corrine MacLellan, a member of the Great War Centenary Society, who recently visited the school in Poperinge.

“Youth engagement is a really important way of commemorating the war, mainly because we want the next generation to understand the cost of war. Sometimes reading it in a text book, or knowing that it happened in a faraway distant place, doesn’t really come off the page for them, so we wanted to do something interactive,” says MacLellan.

McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields’” on May 3, 1915 following the Second Battle of Ypres and after the burial of his close friend who was killed in service. The school the Belgian children attend is near the site where McCrae served and wrote the poem.

“I actually didn’t know John McCrea was Canadian, but I thought that was a really cool thing. How we actually had Canadians fighting in Belgium and working in Belgium, that was one of my favourite things I took from this,” says Devin Gallo, a grade 8 student at Fairview Junior High. “I’d like to go to Belgium. I haven’t gone to Belgium and I’d like to visit Flanders’ Fields and see what happened there."

Once the poem was read, students had the chance to ask each other questions and learn about each other’s cultures.

“I learned that they’re not that different from us, that they just speak a different language. It surprised me that they know the same music as us”, says grade eight student Carissa Lynch.

The Royal Canadian Mint unveiled two new commemorative coins Thursday as part of McCrae’s legacy - a one-ounce silver coin that captures the stirring imagery of ‘In Flanders Fields’ and a coloured, five-ounce silver coin with words from the poem etched on it.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Suzette Beliveau