The final chapter: Wrapping up Central Elementary’s second-grade book project

In its second semester of the 2024-2025 school year, the Central Elementary children’s book project has officially taken off into the world of professionalism. 

While the first semester was used for in-person field trips to Central Academy of the Arts to record information, this semester has prioritized concluding and implementing the layout design, as well as raising funds for printing.

Leader of the project, Pearce Intern Mary Provost, ensured that the three different second-grade classes involved stood apart from one another, while still being featured in the same publication. Provost delegated the tasks of page and cover design, ultimately creating a team specific to book creativity.

“Delegating the different aspects was necessary because, while this is a fun project at its core, we still wanted to maintain that sense of professionalism when putting the final product together,” Provost said.

Provost established entirely separate groups for financial endeavors and book design because both processes required their own set of eyes. 

In order to take the book from handwritten hard copies to a designed and bounded book, the finance team, led by Pearce intern Kylie DeWeese, reached out to many organizations for sponsorships and donations. Deweese was able to secure Clemson Panhellenic organizations, the National Panhellenic Council and the South Carolina Review as generous sources of financial support for both the printing of the books and the celebration for the children. The team even raised money to purchase enough “Magic Treehouse” books to gift to the children at their final party.

The book design team has been progressively imaginative this semester. While last semester started with a black-and-white skeleton of a possible book cover idea, this semester has been overpouring with colorful and concrete concepts to represent the “My Favorite Animal” theme of the children’s book.

“We wanted the kids to get excited about having their work featured in the book and to make each of the classes feel special in their own way. Choosing different colors and animals to distinguish the three classes helped instill some separation from the other students, while keeping that feeling of teamwork for their accomplishment as a class,” Provost said.

After many rounds of edits, the book design team combined the participants’ cover designs, cultivating a jungle theme that still incorporated domestic and aquatic animals some students had decided to write about.

The book design team included student pictures, written paragraphs and drawings. The team made sure to highlight the different classes by giving each class a contrasting page layout. With one agricultural theme, one oceanic and one safari, the classes are assured not to be confused with one another. The second-grade students will most likely adore their assigned theme simply because of the uniting “teamwork” nature it brings to the class. The students will be able to look back at their classmates’ work and understand that the book would not be possible without the input of every student in the class.

“At Central Academy of the Arts, we believe in the power of collaboration—and our partnership with the Pearce Center at Clemson University is a perfect example of what happens when education and mentorship come together,” Fonda Dupre, Central Elementary Arts magnet coordinator, wrote.

The second-grade students’ ability to recognize and appreciate the strengths of their fellow classmates at such a young age will benefit their collaborative skills in future academic and professional settings. The students sitting in groups and creating their favorite animal drawings, while also stopping to assist classmates on words they were unsure of, embodied the selfless characterization and unification that big projects, such as a group effort to produce a class book, elicit.

To acknowledge the hard work the students poured into this children’s book, Provost planned an end-of-the-year celebration for the kids who facilitated this project.

The celebratory party was in late April, involving an assortment of treats and pizza. The biggest element of this event was a visit from Clemson University’s tiger mascot and he signed the student’s physical copies of the finished book.

The Central Elementary book project has been an aspiration long in the making, seeing as it has taken almost nine months to complete.  Leaving the second-grade students with a class morale of community was the end-goal of the book project, while also engaging the children with their own unique personalities via creative expression.

By: Alyssa Dolina, staff writer