Seventh-grade teacher’s classes write novels for second graders 

The love of reading is shared with people of various ages — including the classes of Rio Norte Junior High School seventh-grade teacher Caroline Regan and her sister, Katherine Solomon, a second-grade teacher at Emblem Academy.  

Spending months encouraging her students to craft their own novels, Regan gave 85 books to Solomon’s class, where they wrote their own book reviews.  

While the teachers encouraged the new generations to write and read, they were, in part, inspired by their mom, Janet Squires, a published children’s book author.  

“I started writing as a photojournalist … but at the same time, I was working as a library media specialist for the Saugus Union School District, so I spent all my time with children’s books. I thought I’d try it and see what I could come up with,” Squires said. “The first one was ‘The Gingerbread Cowboy.’” 

According to Squires, the hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were printed and distributed to children throughout the country — especially in Arizona.  

“It’s in all the libraries throughout the country, and that was really exciting for my first children’s book. It was the Arizona governor’s [at the time] 2007 first-grade book — a special edition was commissioned, and 100,000 copies were printed. A book was given to every child in the first grade in the state of Arizona,” Squires said. “I went and toured with the governor and read the story. It was just a lot of fun.” 

A few years ago, Regan decided to implement her mother’s influence and have her students write children’s stories, as well.  

“This is my 18th year of teaching elementary school and now junior high, and I grew up with my mom’s influence of being a librarian and being in the library and reading lots of books. Part of the curriculum for seventh grade English is that students need to learn how to write a narrative, and craft characters, plots, settings, themes,” Regan said. “We’re used to traditional narrative writing, but then I thought, ‘How fun would it be if they wrote children’s stories?’” 

With some of the 85 books being a maximum of 21 pages total, along with illustrations done by the students, the project was no easy feat for Regan and her classes. 

“It’s a challenging project, but everyone got so excited. It takes months, but they’re in control of the whole storyline. We look at children’s stories ahead of time, analyzing them for elements that they should have. There’s a lot that goes into their stories, but they’re very proud of their stories at the end,” Regan said. “I have 158 students, but some teamed up. They’ll get the books back after winter break, and they’re excited to look at the book reviews and keep their books.” 

Solomon said her students were so excited to receive their books, that they were “jumping up and down” when the books arrived.  

“Caroline passed the books off to me, and I had really hyped it for quite a while. They were thrilled over the top — it was almost better than Santa. It was really cute to see their reactions. I feel like they really look up to the seventh graders, even if they don’t know who they are,” Solomon said. “My kids had an opportunity to earn free recess, and [instead] they were begging me to work on their book reviews.” 

For Solomon’s 28 students, they not only enjoyed working on their book reviews, but also are even inspired to create their own stories in the future after seeing that the older students took the time and effort to create books for them specifically. 

“We’ve done book reviews in the past, but my students have never taken so much time on them. They rated the books, then they talked about their favorite parts. Then, I asked my students to tell me what the theme of the story was, and this was something new that we did this year,” Solomon said. “I think it was one of the most meaningful parts of the book review, because we’re working on empathy. My students love that the books have a message to them.” 

According to Lauren Do, 12, one of Regan’s seventh-grade students who participated in the activity, “it was such an exciting, creativity-fueled process. It felt so nostalgic revisiting the nature of children’s books, only this time, we were the ones crafting the memories.”