Former School of Discovery students accomplished a feat that many can only dream of when their work was published in a nationally recognized student poetry anthology.

After submitting Haiku poems as a part of their class project, a the work of 19 former discovery students was chosen for publications for the National Schools Project’s Annual 18th edition of Young American Poetry Digest, which was released November 2013.

“It just excites us to see what our children are doing,” Jacqueline Lucy, an English and Social Studies teacher at the School of Discovery, said. “We encourage them to do their very best, and we can see in the poems that they try to use the literary elements that they have been taught. We are just ecstatic about it.”

Each January the School of Discovery receives a letter from the National School Project inviting the students to submit a Haiku the organization.

Once the national organization, which was initiated in 1994 to provide an audience for student poetry and provide an audience for student poetry, reviews all entries they select the best ones for publication.

About 10 more students were selected for publication than last year.

Young said that people tend to underestimate how difficult it can be to create a haiku, which is a short Japanese 3-lined poem complete with 17 syllables in lines of five, seven, and five that traditionally evokes images of the natural world.

“It’s not as easy as it looks,” School of Discovery Librarian and project organizer Nichole Young said. “It’s three lines long, but you have to think. You have count syllables. You have to take your time with it.”

The students’ submitted poems collectively covered a wide range of topics including weather and things they enjoyed.

Lucy said the students, who were notified before going on to another school, were excited when they heard the news of their publication.

“They were all excited,” Lucy said. “They were bringing all of us the letters letting us see that they had been chosen.”

Young said that she is looking forward to January, which is when she will begin preparing the next group of students for the competition.

“I’m hoping that we have even more children than last year,” Young said. “I’m very excited and looking forward to it and so are the teachers so is the principal Ms. Walker.”