Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
When she took her job at the Pocahontas County Parks and Recreation Community Wellness Center, Anna Cassell wanted to find new and creative ways to work with kids in the afterschool program.
While the wellness center is a great place to play, work out and stay fit, Cassell said it’s also a great place to get creative. That’s why she started the Pocahontas Pages group.
“Pocahontas Pages started out as an afterschool program to basically say recreation isn’t just sports,” she said. “It is being creative. It’s about writing; it’s art and all of that.”
The group meets once a week at the wellness center to hone their creative writing skills.
Cassell applied to Studentreasures.com for a book writing kit and the group worked on creating their own “ABCs of Pocahontas County” book.
The group includes students from kindergarten through 12th grade, and they worked together to create a colorful book that they dedicated to the communities that raised them.
“This project quickly turned into tourism of Pocahontas County,” Cassell said. “Everybody chose a letter and some of them wrote informational facts about their word for that letter and some wrote poems.”
The information and/or poems are accompanied by drawings by the students.
The book came out so well that Cassell plans to do the project again this coming fall. She has some ideas for the theme but is keeping them to herself for now.
The books are published for free by Studentreasures and are available for purchase from the website, studentreasures.com/ordercopies
Copies of the book are also at all the county libraries for families to enjoy.
