1) The author wrote and illustrated a children's book for a senior project to teach elementary school students about how things are not always what they seem. 2) She worked with her facilitator and an elementary school teacher to have her book illustrated and read to a first grade class. 3) Through the process, the author bonded with the students and realized that while educating children through literature is worthwhile, writing children's books may not be the best career path for her.

1. Brooke Spann
AP Lit
Tillery
18 April, 2012
A poet by the name of John Milton once wrote that, “The childhood shows the man as
morning shows the day.” To me, this means that childhood introduces each individual to their
future, and the different qualities and factors of each individual’s childhood affect his or her
future outcome. Considering this, I chose to write a children’s book for my senior project and
read it to an elementary class so that I could educate kids on one of life’s several important
lessons and open the kids’ minds to the diverse world that we live in. Before I started on my
product, however, I researched more about the use of literature to educate children, the lessons
taught in children’s books, and the influences of classic childhood characters on children so that I
can reasonably relate my book to the lives of the children.
First and foremost when writing my book, I needed to pick an age group that I wanted my
book to appeal to, so I went to talk about it with Mr. Sapere, my facilitator. Conveniently, Mr.
Sapere is currently working on a project of his own on a similar subject as mine, and he is the
leader of C.A.R.E.S., the program through which I read to elementary students once a month.
When I went to him to tell him that I was leaning toward the kindergarten/first grade age group,
he informed me that he has a daughter who is in first grade at Avery Elementary School, and he
could arrange for me to read my book to her class and hear the students’ feedback about my
book. I eagerly approved of the idea, and proceeded to the next step of writing my book, which
was choosing a theme. The theme would be the life lesson that I wanted to teach to the kids, so I

2. brainstormed for a few days on what lessons I think are important to teach the kids of that age. I
had a hard time coming up with ones that I thought would be effective in influencing the kids’
lives, so Mr. Sapere kindly lended me some of the published books that he reads to his own
children to look over a gather ideas from. After thumbing through and actually reading some of
those books, my list of themes grew, and I decided to base my book on the theme that “not
everything is as it appears.” Now that I have my age-group and theme decided, I just need my
characters before I start brainstorming an actual outline of the story, and here I had to keep in
mind that the characters need to appeal to both genders. At first, I had the idea to use well-
known, non-gender specific, lovable characters like Mickey Mouse or the Cat-in-the-Hat because
I wanted the kids to want to look up to the characters. However, we suddenly realized that we
cannot use copyrighted characters, so I made up my own characters. I made Zack the Zebra and
Chester the Cheetah my main characters because they exemplify my theme since they appear to
be natural enemies, but become best friends regardless of their naturally opposing lives. At this
point, I had a generic outline to work off of as I started writing my book. However, rather than
brainstorming the highlights of the story as I would do for a school essay, I just opened
Microsoft Word, started writing, and let my inspiration take over as I made progress. The fault
with this method, however, is that my story did not always flow nicely at times. For instance,
after writing the first eight pages, I could not figure out how to transition from Zack and
Chester’s first day together to that night when they both got home and were lectured by their
parents. So, I sat down and brainstormed an outline for the rest of my book so that I would not
get stuck between two points in the story again. I did run into one other situation during the
rough draft of my book, though. When I was writing one day and approached my thirteenth page,
I suddenly felt like the book was nearing a length that was too long since children have about a

3. fifteen-minute attention span. In a hurry to end the story, I wrapped it up in a few pages from that
point, but it did not flow as nice as I had hoped it would. I felt like it was a sudden conclusion to
a story that built its way up to a climax, but skipped the falling action to go straight to the
resolution. As I reread it several times and compared it with other published children’s books,
however, it seemed more reasonable, so I emailed my rough draft to Mr. Sapere to read over it
and asked him to thoroughly read the ending and tell me his thoughts about it. Fortunately, his
response was very reassuring because he thought it was fine and pointed out that the kids would
not notice even if the story did jump around. After that, I fixed the few grammar errors and
awkward wording choices that I had, reread it, and completed my final draft. Unfortunately, I
was running out of time to create the physical book and get an illustrator. I had been looking into
a program called Snapfish to make my book, but as I played around with it, I learned that it is
more of a scrapbook program. On the other hand, I had a friend who was generously going to do
my illustrations for me because I am by no means an artist, but her lacrosse season started and
often caused conflicts with our schedule. So, to hit two birds with one stone, I decided that I
would print my book on paper and have the kids be the illustrators because I wanted to know
what their perception of my story would be. I eagerly hunted down Mr. Sapere at school and told
him about my idea, and he thought it was a great idea. He emailed Mrs. Wallace, who is the
teacher of his daughter’s class, to inform her about my project and let her know that I would
need her help to carry out my idea. Fortunately, she agreed and was very willing to help and
flexible to my schedule. After emailing back and forth a few times, we arranged a day and time
for me to come in and read the blank pages to her class. That day came around shortly after
Spring Break, and I read them the blank book so that they would know what the overall book is
about before they started coloring, and when I asked them what message they thought the book

4. was trying to convey to them, the first student to raise her hand answered with the exact theme
that I was trying to get across to them. That was a huge accomplishment. Then, I paired them
together to assign a page to each group. I had to leave them in the middle of the activity in order
for me to not be late for school, but I was able to pick the illustrated pages up during my normal
reading rounds for C.A.R.E.S. later that week. However, most of the Wallace Woods, as they
call themselves, asked for me to read it again with it being illustrated. That was a good sign! I
did so, and they all enjoyed it more with pictures, especially their own pictures. Then, when I
told them that I was going to give credit to the Wallace Woods for the illustrations and put their
name on the cover of the book, they were so excited. The next step was binding the book, which
I arranged to do it myself at my mom’s office since it is cheaper and they have the supplies.
Before I could bind the book, I needed an illustration for the cover page, so I scanned my
favorite of all the drawings and formatted and resized it to fit perfectly on the cover page. We did
have technical difficulties during this process because the printer wanted to print the picture on a
portrait scale rather than a landscape scale no matter what we told it to do, so the picture kept
coming out sideways like this. So, we resized its width to fit a portrait scale, and we eventually
got the picture to print right. Now, we just needed to decide what paper to print the cover and
back on since it should be more official than the rest of the book, and with this decision of course
came more issues. When we printed on the 100-pound cardstock paper, there was a color
distortion and the ridges of the paper were clearly visible throughout the center of the drawing;
however, there was no way to fix this because it prints like this on all ridged cardstock paper,
which is all we had other than the 60-pound paper that I used to print the rest of the book out. I
decided that since this color distortion sets it apart from the same drawing in the book, it looks
fine, so I proceeded to pick out a color of binding that matches best with the colors of the front

5. page, but bring about a childlike appearance at the same time. I chose yellow, binded it, and that
was all that was needed to be done for my final product. As I was about to take a deep breath to
being finished, though, I had the idea to print copies for each of the students of the Wallace
Woods so that they could have a copy of their first illustrations in a book. Even though my final
book had a cardstock cover and back and a yellow binding to match, I printed the covers and
backs for the kids’ copies on the 60 –pound paper and binded them with navy blue binding
because we did not have enough of the cardstock paper or the yellow binding for each student. I
will send these copies to the class at the end of the week along with a thank you card to all of
them. Finally, my project was done!
As for my research paper, it guided me through my theme-picking and character-picking
processes since it elaborates about how certain themes relate to certain age groups and how the
characters of classic children’s books serve as role models for both young girls and young boys. I
also discussed in my paper that children’s books provide a great opportunity for children and the
adult figures in their lives to bond with each other, which is exactly what my book did with the
Wallace Woods and myself. For example, the kids began to ask me about why I chose a zebra
and a cheetah for the characters during my first visit to them, and when I replied that they are
simply two figures in nature who appeared to be enemies, but could become best friends if they
wanted to, most of the kids raised their hands in eager gestures to tell me all about their pets. My
book and my reading it to them and involving them in the making of it bonded us on the subject
of animals, and I enjoyed hearing their stories about their pets. Also an important topic of my
research paper is how those children who are often read to in their youth will usually pick up
reading quicker than those children who are not as often read to. In fact, among my research, I
came across a claim of an unknown author of the National Education Association that, “Students

6. who do more reading at home are better readers and have better math scores…and higher reading
scores.” Even the National Education Association is noticing this trend with you children.
As a result of this project, I have come to realize that writing children’s books is not the
best career choice for me since I do not like sitting in one spot in front of a computer screen for
hours at a time. Also, writing the book was not a personal priority over other activities that I have
had occurring throughout my senior year. On the other hand, I do wish to continue educating
children through literature and influencing their choices and morals, so I think writing children’s
books would be a great free-time occupancy outside of my full-time career. As for senior project
in general, I think it was a great representation of the career-related projects that I am expecting
to encounter in college. Plus, I am grateful that it made me realize that I should not waste money
or time on an English major in college.
I want to thank you all for tanking your time and coming here this evening to listen to and
learn from my experiences. I will take any questions that you have for me at this time.