Five-year-old Eli Daykin recently brought home a buddy.
Not the human kind, but a stuffed animal by the name of Art.
Before Art was a toy, he existed in Daykin’s imagination. He was recently transformed into a toy thanks to a collaboration between Heather Park Elementary and Kelly Road Secondary.
(via Donna McLachlan)The buddy program between the two schools saw the elementary kids draw their monsters on paper. The high schoolers (also art sculpting students) then took those sketches and turned them into something tangible.
“He was so excited," Michael Daykin, Eli's father, tells PrinceGeorgeMatters. “He loved it so much we actually had to re-stitch it.”
Michael adds the stuffy and Daykin, who has Down syndrome, have been inseparable.
“He wouldn’t let it go for a while and took it to bed with him.”
Robyn Beauregard, an art sculpture teacher at Kelly Road Secondary, says it took roughly one solid month of work for the stuffies to be finished (about five hours a week). The art class had to make patterns for the monsters and then put the toy together.
“It was really heartwarming,” she says of the project.
