AUBURN – Their drawings are simple. Their vocabulary is basic.

And many of them are still learning how to read.

But nearly 450 Sherwood Heights Elementary School students have become Auburn’s newest authors. They have written and illustrated their own book with help from a professional author and illustrator.

“It was really fun,” said 6-year-old Gabriel Gagnon. “We thought about the words.”

The Sherwood students helped create the 48-page children’s book, “One Day in One Town, Auburn, Maine” during workshops with children’s author Margy Burns Knight and illustrator Anne Sibley O’Brien.

The colorful book presents daily life from an Auburn child’s point of view, starting at the 8:25 a.m. school bell and ending with bedtime stories. Story sections feature pizza lunches and chores, snowball fights and karate lessons, highlighting a life likely alien to children in other parts of the world.

The theme mirrored Knight and O’Brien’s own popular nonfiction children’s book “Africa is Not a Country,” which tells American kids about the lives of children in several African countries.

Although Knight and O’Brien had a rough outline for the Sherwood book when they started their weeklong residency earlier this month, students changed the plan.

“I wanted to show that Maine is one of the places with the best lobster,” said 12-year-old Josh Libby, who, with other students, got Knight and O’Brien to scrap their plan for a page on potatoes.

While Knight wrote the story with help from students, O’Brien did the major illustrations. She based some of the children on Sherwood students, adding Somali kids to reflect the school’s large Somali population.

Beside O’Brien’s professional illustrations, students added their own small drawings of television sets, dollar bills and other elements of life in Maine.

Each student will get a copy of the book, which is now being printed. Other copies will be sold to help offset the $650 in printing costs.

But more importantly, some kids said, copies will be sent to schools in Africa. They hope to start an exchange.

Said Libby, “It’s fun telling kids in Africa about Maine because Africa is different by a long shot.”

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