Each year, when Crosby Middle School’s library closes for two weeks to accommodate state assessment testing, Jennifer Perry, the school’s library media specialist, finds herself with a rare luxury: a short window of free time to embark on an extracurricular project with students.

For the past two years, she’s collaborated with language arts teacher Peggy Brown, and together, they’ve worked with groups of sixth graders at the Louisville school, helping them create submissions for KET’s Young Writers Contest.

Time is so limited for teachers that I don’t know if we’d have the ability to do something like this on our own. But KET provides us with everything we need to jump in and get moving quickly.

Jennifer Perry, library media specialist, Crosby Middle School

“The contest has been such an awesome opportunity to show what our students can do,” Brown said. “And the kids get so excited working on their projects, which is something you don’t normally see in the language arts.”

For nearly 30 years, KET has sponsored a writing contest for school children, encouraging them to flex their creative muscles and craft their own original poems, illustrations and short stories.

Drawing thousands of entries from Kentucky students each year, the Young Writers Contest is just one of the many educational resources that KET creates and maintains to support student achievement and promote school readiness. And the contest – like other KET favorites such as the weekly News Quiz program, Kentucky field trips, Social Studies Shorts and the Arts Toolkit – have become staples in classrooms across the Commonwealth, beloved by students and educators alike for their quality, their engaging instructional content and the wealth of supporting materials making them easy to use.

“Time is so limited for teachers that I don’t know if we’d have the ability to do something like this on our own,” Perry said. “But KET provides us with everything we need to jump in and get moving quickly.”

For each of the Young Writers Contest’s four categories – poems, short stories, illustrated stories and graphic novels – KET furnishes a toolkit that explains the genre, offers examples of different approaches and points to additional resources for further exploration.

“A lot of the kids don’t love writing,” Perry said. “But the toolkits are so easy to follow and they teach the lessons in such a fun way that it really helped them get started and give them what they needed to create their first characters and illustrate their stories.”

One of the most challenging aspects of the contest, Perry and Brown said, was convincing students to hold off on sharing their ideas with classmates until a final “peer review” session in which students show their work and get feedback from the rest of the class.

“I mean we had chicken nuggets as characters. Pickles. Princesses,” Perry said. “You name it, we had it. So we wanted to keep those ideas private until the end to preserve originality.”

It was an approach that worked, if the results are any indication. In their first year submitting to the Young Writers Contest, Crosby students earned a pair of honorable mentions in the Illustrated Story category. And this year, they followed up with an even better showing, taking home first, second and third place – a feat they celebrated with a special ice cream party.

“We were absolutely thrilled, and the kids’ reactions when they heard they’d won were absolutely priceless,” Perry said. “We both left feeling like we did something pretty cool this year. And we’re just so grateful that KET helped make this happen for our kids.”