Desert Wind Middle School on Friday morning held a book launch where it recognized five of its sixth-grade classes — together known as Team Luigi — who wrote essays that were then compiled into books and published for students and their families to purchase.  

“It started in my classroom last year because, obviously, writing is English,” said Yricka Ursal, a sixth-grade English teacher at the middle school. “I did the little event in my classroom last year; the kids loved it … The principal challenged me to do it with a team this year.”  

Ursal, here on a J-1 visa, imported the project from her native Philippines. 

Math teacher James Jay Llerin assisted Ursal with the project last year and was excited to bring it to his class.  

The two recruited social studies teacher Mardel Amerkhan, science teacher Jee Ar Acosta and Chrystal Ejim, who teaches English as a second language, to their team. The coalition had started planning how to integrate all subjects into the writing event at the beginning of the school year, Llerin said.  

• English students wrote about cultural icons and their contributions to society. 

• Math students wrote about how arithmetic is applied in real-world scenarios. 

• Social studies students wrote about different countries around the world. 

• Students learning English as a second language wrote about their own cultures in a new language. 

Ursal noted that the most challenging writing prompt to conjure was math, as it is the biggest departure from English. So, the teachers settled on a literary nonfiction project and directed the kids to write about real-life math problems and turn it into a narrative story — told in graphic-novel fashion. 

“There are a lot of kids who love to do drawings,” Llerin said. 

The teachers published each class’s book through Studentreasures Publishing, where the books are available to be purchased by students and their families.  

“They send us a draft that we can write on and have the kids write on,” Ursal said. “Then we ship that back to them, and they ship it back to us. 

“We don’t owe anything and we’re not earning anything from them. The parents just order directly from the website,” she said. 

She said she hopes the project will continue to expand not only to the other sixth-grade classes but to the entire school.  

Ursal emphasized that the importance of the project is showing the kids that they are capable and can do anything.  

“Kids doubt themselves,” Ursal said. “They’re like, ‘I can’t do this, and I can’t do that.’ I want to show them that we celebrate their writing. It’s not a boring thing … writing will never be a boring thing. It’s a way to express yourself. It’s an outlet for every single emotion.”