BWE’s Blake Podraza creates winning book

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Ear­lier dur­ing the school year, Coral Donatto, a Big Wal­nut senior who does half days at the Delaware Area Career Center’s Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Acad­emy, needed to com­plete an inter­ac­tive media senior project.

Donatto decided to include some ele­men­tary level stu­dents in her project, specif­i­cally, stu­dents in Mendi Pries­tas’ third-grade class at Big Wal­nut Ele­men­tary School.

In the fall Donatto spent time in the third-grader’s class­room and asked each stu­dent to write a story and cre­ate draw­ings illus­trat­ing their tale; and writ­ing the sto­ries and cre­at­ing the illus­tra­tions became a class­room project.

“The stu­dents wrote sto­ries and drew pic­tures, then later I chose the one I liked best,” Donatto said. “Then I manip­u­lated images with Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor, and cre­ated a book from the story.”

Donatto had four copies of the book made at Walgreen’s and on Wednes­day, Decem­ber 19, stopped at BWE to announce to the class that Blake Podraza wrote the win­ning story.

“It was hard to choose the win­ning story, all the sto­ries were really good,” Donatto said. “But I really liked Blake’s story and thought it made a nice book.”

After Donatto pre­sented Blake with his very own copy of the book he had writ­ten, he read his story to the class.

“It felt good to have my story cho­sen to be made into a book,” Blake said.

Posted by Gary Henery on Jan 9 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.