MIDDLEBORO – Middleboro High School students Matt Youngquist and Bayley Martin spent weeks perfecting their children's book about a bunny and a group of bears, but when it came time to share their work with children at the Memorial Early Childhood Center, they were faced with tough questions that they hadn’t prepared for. 

“They were concerned [about] how the animals were talking. We just told them it was a fiction book,” Youngquist said. “I probably expected them to be a little nicer.”

Aside from concerns about realism, Youngquist said that spending time at the Memorial Early Childhood Center on Tuesday, Nov. 28 gave him a sense of nostalgia about his own experience as a child.

“It would be cool when I was in kindergarten if someone came in there and read a book for me,” Youngquist said.

Youngquist and Martin wrote the book in a storytelling class taught by English teacher Megan Connor. She explained that writing children’s books is a good learning experience because it teaches students to simplify their writing so it can be understood even by young kids.

“One of the challenges I think they had was trying to get the sentence structure and the language at a level that would be accessible to younger kids,” Connor said. “That’s not always easy.”

After writing the books in Connor’s class, students got a chance to illustrate their books and turn them into  physical objects at the high school’s Innovation Lab. 

Tony Chiuppi, who coordinates the lab, explained that students used software called Canva to design the illustrations.

Kaitlyn Jones, who attended Memorial Early Childhood Center, wrote a book with classmate Lexi Drevitch about a cat named Cleo. 

She said that returning to the school brought back memories of her time as a much younger student.

“Everything seems so much smaller now,” Jones said. “I do remember some things, and it made me nostalgic.”

Jones said that she and Drevitch drew inspiration from their own pets when writing their story.

“We just thought back to stories we read as kids,” Jones added.

As Jones and Drevitch read their story to three separate classrooms at the Childhood Center, the children listened attentively. But when the story was finished, its authors weren’t spared from having to respond to some of the same tough questions as Youngquist and Martin.

“I didn’t really expect them to be stuck on the fact that dogs and cats couldn’t talk,” Drevitch said.