Grade 2 students at Queen Elizabeth School have written and published a book.
On Thursday, March 3rd, the class celebrated the publication at their very own book-reading and publishing party.
The children’s picture book was made in collaboration with grade 11 and 12 students of Mr. Jason Sand’s digital art class, at the Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School. The grade 2 students wrote and illustrated Monstrous Feelings, a book meant to help autistic children identify their emotions and learn to accept and appropriately deal with how they’re feeling, and does so by depicting monsters exhibiting various emotions.
“They were responsible for enhancing the illustrations… So they took my students’ illustrations and their paragraphs they wrote about their monsters, and they enhanced them to be publication quality. And then, they were also responsible for assembling the iBook,” says grade 2 teacher, Ms. Robyn Torry.
Both Sand and Torry are “Apple certified instructors” or Apple Distinguished Educators, a global community of education leaders recognized for doing amazing things with Apple technology in and out of the classroom,” according to the Apple website. The ADEs integrate technology into learning environments as well as their expertise with other educators and policy makers.
Torry says putting the book together takes approximately 2 months all together and that she usually helps her class put together 2 books over the course of the year. The next one, Torry says, will be a non-fiction book about a penguin.
There are no hardcopies of the book but it is currently available for free download on iBooks.