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Wisconsin Students Write Book, Win Award

Students display their award-winning book.

“I was excited,” said second grader Kassandra Freismuth.

Kassandra, a student at Holmen’s Sand Lake Elementary School, is right to be excited. She was among the students who wrote a book, entered it into the Wisconsin Public Television Reading Rainbow Series Young Authors Contest, and won the judge’s award!

There were more than 420 entries in the contest. Freismuth and all of the deaf and hard of hearing students in teacher Tracie Happel’s class won the judge’s award for their work on The Hard of Hearing Book.

“The entire book was the students’ work,” said Happel. “It was the students’ ideas and their words. They really handled the process well.”

The process began with finding a subject to write about. “We’re all hard of hearing and one of us is deaf,” said third grader Rebekah Olson, “and we just thought people would like to learn about what it’s like ...”

Once they picked their subject, they wrote positives or negatives; things they can do, things that make them like everybody else, some things that maybe they couldn’t do or had to do differently …,” said Happel.

What will people learn when they read the book? “They’ll learn that it might not be easy and you kind of might not like it,” said Olson, “but there are some things you might like.”

“People can look at our book in the library,” she added. “Teachers can check it out for their class to see. It’s just really awesome to have the book in the library for people to see.”

“I am so proud of how hard the students worked,” said Happel. “They did an amazing, beautiful job on this book.”

For additional information about this story, please visit the Holmen, Wisconsin Courier website.

- Adapted from a story by Lisa Klein, from WKBT-TV NewsChannel 8 website.

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