DECATUR -- A teacher once asked of her class, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
One young student replied, "A writer."
This is the dream of a lot of young people from all across the country. For a group of students in Northwest Arkansas, that dream became a reality.
Ashley Lee's second grade class at Decatur Northside Elementary began an ambitious project to research each class member's diverse heritage and write a page describing the class findings.
"We had been discussing a lot about our cultures in second grade and how every single person in our classroom was a part of many different cultures," said Lee. "We decided as a grade to incorporate our diversity into a classroom book."
Lee's class displayed its finished projects during the Parent Teacher Organization's Culture Night last December. After the show, the projects were collected by Lee to send off to the publisher.
"The second grade and first grade teachers felt that it was important for our students to create a book and understand the process it takes to make a book," Lee said. "For anyone that wants to be an author, it is a matter of just following their dreams and doing it. The company 'Student Treasures' is a company where they give you the opportunity to make a book and they will create the hardback book for free, and then whoever would like to buy the book can."
After about a one month wait, the finished book arrived at Northside, much to the delight of a group of excited second graders.
"We will keep our 'Diggin' Diversity' book in our classroom library for the students to see it and read what their class wrote," said Lee.
General News on 02/03/2016