Eighth grade students in the West Central Valley School District are learning there’s more to the world than just what happens in our own backyard, our own country and even our own continent.

Language Arts teacher Hanna Wilson has traveled the world on missions trips and working with at risk youth and now she’s bringing the lessons she has learned to area students.

“My goal with my students here is that they would understand the ability to write can impact the world around them.  So I always look for ways to just make sure that their assignments are bigger than just writing an essay, they actually have an application and a purpose.”

For the second year in a row, Wilson’s students are studying the civil war and refugee crisis in Syria.  The teens learn about what’s happening and then have to put their knowledge to work.

“They have to write a newspaper article about some aspect that they choose from that conflict. The reason we have them do that is because they have not, up to this point, really written non-bias writing.  They do a lot of story writing but nonfiction writing is a little big more challenging.  So we try to pick something that they have a heart for, they have a passion for figuring out why things like that would happen.”

Wilson says at first, this year’s class was quiet and she worried they were not into the idea when in fact they told her they were just shocked that these things are happening in the world.

We’ll speak with some of the students later this month on our Let’s Talk Guthrie County program.