Rifle High School IB Students Collaborate with Highland Elementary to Create Bilingual Children’s Book

When three inventive International Baccalaureate (IB) juniors from Rifle High School joined forces with a lively class of fourth graders at Highland Elementary, a memorable hero was hatched—a duck. With help from the younger students’ imaginative ideas, juniors Jasmin Abarca, Violet Reeves, and Kalli Rapp are hard at work on a bilingual children’s book that champions creativity, inclusivity, and service.

Jasmin Violet and Kalli are using their CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service) requirement for IB to develop the book. The working title is “Masked,” and project exemplifies the district’s Graduate Profile characteristics of being academically prepared, empowered individuals, strong and determined, and community-connected.

This project fits perfectly into the CAS objectives, explained Jasmin.

“The creativity part is the book-making, writing, and illustrating. The activity part is interacting with students, and the service part is at the end of it, after we write it and we publish it, we want donate the book to many places like the school libraries, and other places.”

The students met with Highland Elementary’s fourth-grade class to dream up story elements and character ideas. 

“We asked them about their favorite animals and colors just so we can incorporate them into the book a little bit and involve them in the creative process,” explained Jasmin.

Their young collaborators championed the main character as a duck, a creative choice that underscores the story’s themes of diversity, belonging, and overcoming language barriers. 

“We originally just wanted to go for a bird, just any bird for the main character,” explained Violet. “I feel like representing that language barrier is a lot easier because birds chirp, so we can represent communication barriers a little bit easier.”

Since birds fly, the concept of an immigrant landing in a place where they may not speak the same language is easy to understand as well. Another advantage to the character choice is that there is a Mask Duck that longs to play superheroes with its newfound friends - all wearing masks.

Violet lends her talents through the illustrations -  experimenting with an art style that’s both child-friendly and reflective of the multicultural perspective the book promotes. 

“I personally took this on because I wanted to see the final product as well as the message getting out, but also so I can challenge myself to do something I wouldn't normally do and create in a way I wouldn't normally create,” she explained. “Finding the balance between my own style and the cartoony nature of a children's book style has been the most difficult, and being consistent with it.”

Meanwhile, Jasmin is the creative driver of the story development and Kalli supports everything from writing to securing publishing resources. 

“We're not just doing this because it's our CAS project,” explained Violet. “We're doing this because it's something that genuinely interests us and something that we have invested time outside of school and made time for. This isn't just something we're doing because it's a school project. We want to give back to our community.”

The Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) project spans the two years of IB instruction and the team hopes to have the book finished early next year.  They are still finalizing the story and the artwork and added that they may consult with their elementary advisors for some fine-tuning.

The project, in conjunction with the intense IB academic coursework, creates a challenge, said Kalli, and she said her team is managing it well.

“We’ve done a lot of storyboarding and now we’re finalizing the details of the story,” Kalli said. “We’re continually thinking about how to make it accessible for a younger audience, especially in two languages.”

Kalli is also working her resources to prepare for when the story is ready for publishing an looking for partnerships to help with the final steps.

“I’ve been developing a list of contacts of places we can place the books, like bookstores and libraries once it is published,” she explained.

By bridging language gaps and celebrating diverse backgrounds, these three juniors are building a children’s book and exemplifying the district’s Graduate Profile in real-time. From start to finish, their work embodies resilience, cultural awareness, creative problem-solving, and the importance of community—values at the heart of Garfield Re-2’s strategic plan and mission.

Anyone interested in supporting the publishing and distribution of “Masked,” contact the IB coordinator Nate Miller at nmiller@garfieldre2.net.