Writing lessons in Mrs. Friend's 4th-grade class at Carl E. Schluter Elementary School in Haslet are about more than good grammar and sentence structure. Students are learning the power of their pencil.
"What happens when we move orcas to a different location," teacher Rachel Friend asked the class.
The students had been studying about orca whales, in particular, two whales named Wikie and Keiju. The mother/son orcas are at a marine park in France but need to move because the country has banned captive orca shows.
"We're trying to get Wikie and Keijo out of captivity," Aayden Pauok said.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. >Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
Their class assignment was to write to the French Minister of Environmental Transition, Mme Agnès Pannier-Runacher. In their handwritten pleas, the students explained why the orcas should go to a marine sanctuary in Nova Scotia rather than another amusement park in the Canary Islands or Japan, where they would still have to perform in a more confined space.
"It was really a couple of weeks later, she had made a post on her Instagram that she was opposing the transfer of Wikie and Keijo to Japan," teacher Rachel Friend said. "And as I'm looking through the post, on the very last picture I see, I recognize a drawing from one of my students, and that's how I knew she actually read them!"
"It's just so crazy," Ellie James said. James' hand-drawn orcas were the ones in the Minister's Instagram post. "Makes me feel like I can do a lot more to prove, even though I'm a kid, I can prove stuff. Even though I'm a kid, everyone thinks we're just too little, and no...kids can also change the world!"
Local
The latest news from around North Texas.
"I just thought this would be a perfect opportunity to give real meaning to their writing and purpose," Friend said. "That you are actually making an impact across the world, and in our world, is really all I could ever hope for as a teacher."
Learning to be better writers taught the students their words can have power.
"Your voice matters," Chandler said. "Everything that you say can influence everybody that you know and even the people you don't know can still influence them."
