BERLIN, Md. -- A book written and illustrated by a second grade class at Showell Elementary School is getting published. Keep Our Beaches Clean! What if Everybody Did That? serves as both the title and message of the book.
In 2020, Mackenzie Keyser's classroom looked very different than it did in 2023. Not because she has added some new wall decorations or moved desks around, but because it was smack dab in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Students were at home, in the middle of their biography unit and learning everything through a computer screen. Even in 2021, once her kids were back in the classroom learning at a distance, Keyser was searching for ways to keep them engaged.
One Instagram direct message later to professional surfer Kelly Slater and Keyser found her answer in the form of a two hour Zoom call. During that call, students asked Slater questions, Slater showed them around his Hawaii home, played the ukulele and told an inspiring story.
"He was on a surf trip in Indonesia and every time he paddled he would get a handful of trash," said Keyser. "This was something that really stuck out to me and the students because we live here, at the ocean and when we swim we aren't getting handfuls of trash."
Feeling motivated, Keyser's class adopted a beach on 15th street in Ocean City.
"The kids were going on their own after school and on the weekends to clean the beach," said Keyser. "We'd enter the trash they found into a database and they were just getting a lot from doing this project."
Camden Pradon was a student in Keyser's second grade class and is a co-author of Keep Our Beaches Clean! What if Everybody Did That? Pradon acknowledged while carrying around bags of trash was not necessarily fun, knowing the impact of what he was doing kept him going.
"It was very motivating because I really wanted to quit like 20 million times, but I kept thinking the turtles are going to be safe and the stingrays and all those animals are going to be in a better place," said Pradon.
A few months after beginning their cleanup project, Keyser reached back out to Slater to let him know just how much of a positive impact he left on her students.
Keyser said Slater was amazed and asked to Zoom with her class again, but this time he had a proposition: The students can write a book to describe their experience cleaning up the beaches.
"So we did that, we wrote a class book and the kids did everything, they did illustrations they helped with the ideas and the messages," said Keyser.
The message of the book is something only one of the authors, Claire Parker, a now fourth-grader at Showell, can truly describe.
"If everybody kept the beach clean then we would have a really clean world but if everybody kept littering the world would be very trashy and have a lot of trash everywhere," said Parker.
Almost three years later and the book is getting published by Di Angelo Publications. It's something Keyser and her students weren't really expecting, but are thrilled about.
"It's really exciting getting to know that it's going around the world to teach other kids about trying to clean up the beaches and just keeping our environment clean," said Parker.
Cody Payne, another co-author said it was the experience and getting to talk with an 11-time World Champion surfer that sticks out to him.
"Just like to have fun with the kids in our class, write it and then just to get on Zoom with Kelly Slater and meet him," said Payne.
The hope is the book will make its way around the world to motivate students to keep our oceans and beaches litter free.
Keep Our Beaches Clean! What if Everybody Did That? will be available for preorder in September and will be in bookstores across the United States by March of 2024.
All proceeds will go to the Kelly Slater Foundation. The foundations mission is to raise awareness about our oceans and the affects we can have on our environment.
"I feel like I owe it all to Kelly Slater because he did this, he inspired me he inspired my class and he took the time for us and he's making a big change," said Keyser.
