Seventh-grade students at Georgia College Early College recently held a book reading for their contemporaries and families showcasing the work they have put into the latest edition of “The Peacock’s Feather.”
Each year, the seventh grade class publishes the book of essays, short stories and photography.
The 55 students in seventh grade are broken down into 11 groups of five each year and they work with a writing mentor to complete the project. Through the Writers in Schools Alliance, the program receives support, training and resources for the students to complete the work. The mentors met with students on Fridays throughout the year to produce the work. The mentors were coordinated through the Peace Corps Fellows and helped organize the Early College Creative Writing Project.
As family members, Early College staffers and classmates listened, students read aloud from their work in “The Peacock’s Feather” in the Arts and Sciences auditorium last week. More than 150 people were gathered for the reading.
Peace Corps Fellow and organizer John Teschner thanked the seventh graders for their hard work and dedication.
“To work with them [the students] was an opportunity to see 55 minds at work,” Teschner said.
Terrian Williams is in the seventh grade at Georgia College Early College and shared her poem “Javion” that she wrote about her cousin’s child.
Parents Terrance and Anita Williams were in the audience, proud of their daughter’s work. Williams was chosen from the random lottery that is held every year to select the 55 students to enter the seventh grade at Early College.
“It’s amazing. We love the program and we’re thankful and grateful to God that she was chosen,” Anita Williams said. “It has been a challenge and has helped her. She was a little scared and skeptical at first, but this has given her a first glimpse of college.”
Early College is an education initiative funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Georgia College Early College is a collaboration between Georgia College and Baldwin and Putnam County public school systems. Each year, 55 sixth grade students are chosen from the systems through a lottery. Those students enter the seventh grade and by the time their peers are graduated, they will have completed two years of college course work at no charge.
