Last year, more than two dozen students at Lehigh Parkway Elementary School participated in a wonderful project to write, illustrate, and publish their own books. The program was an amazing success, and this year almost 50 young authors are hard at work again!

The basics of the project are the same as last year: getting kids involved in every step of the process and giving them a goal to work toward that's more than just a grade on a paper. But the program has expanded tremendously!

With double the number of students participating, they're using two full classrooms to accomodate everybody. Donald Stahl is joined this year by project co-leader  Robin Hohe  to make sure every student has enough guidance and mentorship. And at Dan's, we've been more than twice as busy getting all these books printed! 

Twice each week, the students logged into our system to work on their projects, and then sent the finished books in to our lab for production. We've gotten tons of pre-orders from the students' friends & family, and our photo lab has been hard at work getting everything printed and ready to go.

And here's the whole stack of books - one from each author.

We have lots more copies ready for Meet the Author night on May 11, 6:00 to 8:00pm. That's when all the hard work pays off, where these young authors get to present their work to the public at Barnes & Noble in the Lehigh Valley Mall. A number of students will even be reading selections from their books.

Meet the Author Night is open to everyone - and when you shop at Barnes & Noble that night a portion of the proceeds go to the school. It was a fantastic event last year, we can't wait to see the turnout this time!