Caswell students author stories together

    CASWELL, Maine — The Dawn F. Barnes Elementary School in Caswell recently received half a dozen new books for its library, each written and illustrated by collaborative groups of students from kindergarten to eighth grade.
The teamwork required to co-author a book meant different things for different teams, and all the results were positive.
Seventh-grader Trinity St. Pierre was the oldest student in her writing group, and that meant listening to all the ideas eagerly put forth by the younger students.
Instead of picking just one or two ideas for the story, St. Pierre incorporated all of the ideas into a book about a snow monster.
“I thought that it was cool to see other people’s ideas and how they got to them, and that made me think I could start (story) webs and things like that,” the seventh-grader said.
Eighth-grader Cassidy Moore and her group ended up writing a book about a spaceship that came to life and ventured out to find aliens — who also came to life.
Arriving at such an adventurous plot was something Moore said she wouldn’t have normally thought of.
“You can start with a (story) web and end up with something super interesting like that,” Moore said.
To share their stories, students read their books aloud to each other on Monday.