Education Seniors, 4th Graders Write History Together

BY MAGGIE MCCABE

Students at Loudoun County High School and Evergreen Mill Elementary School teamed up to turn chapters from the fourth-grade history textbook into their own illustrated and published storybooks.

The books are for sale on Amazon, and all profits go to purchase copies of the books for the Evergreen Mill Elementary School and Loudoun County High School libraries.

The project was created in 2017 by Tracy Cody, a high school government teacher, and her daughter, Kathryn Hicks, a fourth-grade teacher.

“We were just talking one night, and we realized we were teaching the same thing for 12th and fourth grade, just on different levels, and so we brainstormed and decided we should do a book because the curriculum overlaps,” Cody said.

After a forced break during the pandemic, they resumed the project and expanded it by adding high school teacher Nancy Thomas’ sections of the same government class that Cody teaches.

This year, four fourth-grade classes and five high school senior government classes worked to create five history books, six chapters each, based on the fourth-grade history curriculum.

This project was a major graded assignment for the high school seniors. Each high school student was given the parameters of the project, their fellow group members, and their assigned chap- ter. From there, it was completely up to the students to work together to develop the final product—a story chapter modeled off a chapter from the history textbook. The project took a lot of time and meetings from the high schoolers, who served as leaders guiding the younger kids through the project.

“Every person in the group had a piece, they were all accountable and all working for it. There wasn’t one person who didn’t work,” Thomas said.

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“We saw students who didn’t typically engage be really engaged,” Cody said. After meeting with their elementary

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