Some Bertha Kennedy students rose to fame this month after winning a national writing contest.
Ottawa-based book publisher DC Canada Education Publishing published his A story a day by children for children anthology earlier this month. The book includes the names of 23 Bertha Kennedy Catholic students who entered a story writing contest related to the book.
DC Canada held a contest earlier this year in which students in grades 1 through 6 from across Canada could submit short stories to have them published in the anthology, said anthology editor Kara Cybanski. They received about 350 entries, 23 of which came from 2nd grade teacher Andrea Frick at Bertha Kennedy.
While none of Bertha Kennedy’s stories were selected for the book, Cybanski said that Frick’s class won the award for most submissions from a single school, earning them $100 in cash and $100 in books from DC Canada.
Frick said she heard about the competition earlier this year and decided to have her class enter it to practice fiction writing.
“The students were really great at putting dialogue into their stories,” she said, demonstrating excellent grammar and punctuation.
Cybanski said the 32 stories chosen for the anthology covered a variety of subjects, including ancient Greek myths, a magical hockey puck, World War I robots, adaptation, dementia and a snail. Many involved magical or scholastic attitudes.
Lydia Ellis, who was in Frick’s class last year, said she was excited to learn her class had won the competition. your entry in it, the adventures of december was inspired by her class’s studies of arctic animals. In it, the arctic fox faces off against an evil mouse who has evil eyes, evil ears and an evil French mustache.
“It took a long time to plan everything,” Ellis said of the story, particularly the plot and characters.
Frick said the class used their prize to throw a cake and sandwich party at the school’s gymnasium in May. The students were excited to share their stories and seemed excited to write.
“Sometimes the kids would come in and say, ‘When is the writing class? Are we writing yet?’” said Frick.
“Just seeing this enthusiasm of young readers and young writers who are passionate about writing and excited to elicit their creativity is all a teacher could wish for.”
Frick said she hopes her 2nd grade class will compete again in this competition when he returns in 2024.
Visit www.dc-canada.ca for book details.
