Last Friday, Megan and the rest of her classmates from Kristine Feda’s first grade celebrated the culmination of a year’s worth of writer’s workshops, the portion of the students’ day when they learned about the many facets that go into publishing a book. Mrs Feda’s class presented their books to parents and other Sandy Hook staff members during her annual Writer’s Tea.

For these students, Writer’s Tea is a way of celebrating their year of writing.

Throughout the school year, Mrs Feda’s students sharpened their writing in three major categories: memories of their life, special people, and everyday events.

The children individually chose the one topic that they wanted to improve on and made it the focus of their book. They underwent the long process of editing and revising their prose, while creating a copyright date, dedication, and author biography.

During last Friday’s Writer’s Tea, students had a chance to reflect on what was the hardest step of the book-writing process: generating story ideas, writing, illustrating, or actually publishing their books.

Many students concluded that the actual publishing step was the hardest to master, because it involved, among other things, coloring in all the illustrations and binding the pages together to create a neat, final package.

For Megan Gibbons, however, writing the book was the hardest part, with having to come up with the author’s biography running a close second.

However, Megan said, “I liked illustrating it, doing the dedication, and publishing it.”

The completed writings were passed on to an editor, a printer, and finally a publisher, where each book was bound, ready for presentation. Along the way, each child created colorful illustrations to go along with their stories.

The Writer’s Tea gave the young scribes the chance to show off their hard work. Proud parents crowded into Mrs Feda’s room and had the opportunity to walk around and read, while recording their encouraging comments on yellow sheets that accompanied each book.

In small, intimate groups, the authors read their works aloud to their classmates and parents, only pausing to show off crayoned pictures of the stories’ central characters.

Each tale was unique, reflecting the diversity of the authors who penned them. Mike Mead told the story of an adventure he had last Easter in his book, The Easter Egg Hunt.

Jenna Bonaccorso chose to focus on something special to her in When I Got My Doll.

Will Northrop wrote about a recent trip he went on with his family in We Went to the Zoo.

Connor Pineau penned My Pet Dog, while his classmate, Steven Braun, took on a household topic in his book, My Bathroom Story, which he dedicated to his father.

Conner Pineau said he learned a lot from the project, and from a whole year spent writing. “I learned about publishing and editing,” he said, adding a conclusion he said he had arrived at recently. “Writing is kind of easy.”