- May 1, 2024
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Belle Terre Elementary School’s sixth-grade teacher and writing coach for the Josh Crews Writing Project, Abbey Cook, coached her students to write “from their heart, instead of what we, as teachers, make them write.”
With that concept of writing, the students wrote numerous short stories from their own imagination and were published all together in a book titled, “Write On!”, for the Josh Crews Writing Project.
Many of the students were very excited at the event, and the fact a book they could truly call their own was being published.
Sixth-grade student and Little League softball catcher Sydney Luther wrote about Martin Luther King and his “I Have a Dream” speech in a poem titled, “We Cannot Walk Alone.”
“The poem is about how you will not walk alone and how God will always walk with you,” said Luther.
Another sixth-grade student, Yasmine Elbana, wrote a tribute to the veterans who have served the country, called, “Let’s Salute Our Veterans.”
“When I wrote it, I was thinking about the veterans in the country and how we should actually appreciate them,” said Elbana.
Cadence Lasher, a fifth-grader at Belle Terre Elementary, had a very unique type of story in which she wrote about an actual dream she had experienced the night before Christmas of last year about seeing her own ghost.
Lasher said, “In the story, instead of it being me, it was a character named Jennifer, or Jenni. … In the dream, I was actually being chased by a yeti-type creature, so I tried to base it off that in my story.”
Emily Callahan, who attended this event just last year, said, “It honestly is even better than the first time around because you know you’re being published, and you actually like what you’re doing.”
Callahan wrote a poem called “Mocking Jay," and, in that poem, she tries to make the comparison between a person who is being discriminated and being “brought down," and a mocking bird who is being brought down from the air.
“It’s about a bird that’s flying, and when the wind becomes strong, it can bring the bird down sometimes lower to the ground," Callahan said. "That makes the bird sad because the bird feels it can only walk around. Then the bird decided to fly again, and then through that, the bird got to see the good in life.”
“I love writing. I have so many ideas and I think to myself, ‘Wait, I need to turn this into a book,'” she added.
Through the countless ideas of these students, they were able to get a book published through the Josh Crews Writing Project, a project that promotes creativity and explorations through the telling and writing of their stories.
This project was dedicated to Josh Crews, who was formerly known for his ability to write and tell stories to others and died just a few years ago.
“Carla Cline and Joe Rizzo, who were friends of Josh and a part of the Flager County Education Foundation, started at a gala, in which the leadership chamber they were working for were having an event Carla and Joe created, a masquerade ball. At the event, they made thousands of dollars that got the project started,” said Deborah Williams, executive director of the Flagler County Education Foundation.
Williams continued on about the students and the teachers, saying “before or after school, there’s a writing club where teachers coach these young students how to write, and with their writing they are selected for a book to be published. After they are chosen, the kids have the chance to sign their own books with their writing in them at this book signing.”
Friends and family of Josh Crews started and supported this project and ever since then have aspired and inspired many young writers to carry out their love for writing.
