Detroit — Looking to hit some city hot spots this summer? Maybe discover something new, or learn more about your favorite stomping ground? A group of Detroit fifth graders has you covered.
The students at University Preparatory Academy elementary school spent months this past school year putting together the Detroit Navigator, a “kid’s-eye view” of the best food, entertainment and places to visit in their city. From Little Caesars Arena and art galleries to taco trucks and Belle Isle, the free guide is available in print at stands across the city and online.
Student Taylor Watkins wrote about Detroit’s famed music scene and its history. An admitted perfectionist, she still believes she could do better if she had just one more draft of her story.
“There was a lot of other stuff I felt I could have included,” Taylor said. “I could have added way more detail because I knew a lot more about what I was writing about.”
The Navigator, published earlier this spring, was a writing-intensive, hands-on learning experience created by 826michigan, a local branch of a national organization that emphasizes writing as an important skill and form of expression. The program’s writing coaches work with teachers to supplement their English Language Arts curriculum with projects that show kids the power of the pen.
Eli Sparkman, volunteer and program coordinator for 826michigan, said the power is also in seeing your words published in a tangible way.
“That’s the great thing about print, is that you can kind of keep holding it, and those are your words to keep returning to,” Sparkman said. “I’m excited for them to be in sixth, and seventh, and eighth grade, and they keep remembering what they made.”
Each student got to choose what they wanted to write about, then had to conduct their own research, write drafts and edit them with support from Sparkman. They wrote their stories through the lens of a novel they had just read about an immigrant girl named Esperanza, and wrote as if they were writing to her directly about what she should do if she came to Detroit.
Students find writing process daunting but rewarding
To student Kynzi Taylor, the whole idea was a little daunting at first.
“Once I did hear about it, I was like ‘Oh, I’m going to be writing a newspaper, a lot of people are going to see it, now I’ve got to think about what I’m going to write,” she said.
Kynzi loves to draw, so she landed on writing about the Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
“I had so many questions” about the museum and the murals, she said. “So I thought, ‘Wow, I can write about what I like and my questions about it, and the way it makes me feel.'”
“My favorite thing I’ve done when I go there is the room where you get to copy a painting,” Kynzi wrote. “I really had fun drawing! I drew a painting where the faces were all different shapes, and then I drew an NBA player riding a horse. It was kind of confusing and weird.”
She ended with an important “heads-up”: “When you go there, make sure to turn on your brain because you’re about to learn a lot.”
English is not Kynzi’s favorite subject. Writing her story was not an easy process. But there was no AI, not even a keyboard for her early drafts.
“Of course, I use mechanical pencils, so a lot of my erasers ran out,” she said. “I made a lot of mistakes.”
But in the end, she said, “I really enjoyed it because as I was writing, I got to express myself, and put my feelings into the words, and talk about the art, what I saw physically.”
Denzall “DJ” Dodd, another student who contributed to Detroit Navigator, loves basketball, so he wrote about the Detroit Pistons. He said he wanted to get everything right about the team and Little Caesars Arena.
“I probably wrote like 3 drafts to make sure,” he said.
826michigan not only published their stories, but also hired a designer, Candace Reid, to professionally lay out the pages and create art for each story.
The first time he saw his words next to the images from the professional designer, DJ said he “felt proud.”
For Taylor, who wrote about Detroit’s music scene and will be in sixth grade next year, she knew she needed to keep her audience in mind.
“It’s kids my age reading this, and we don’t really have a long attention span,” she said. “So I had to think about how can I add detail but still keep it short.”
826 works to promote writing, collaboration
Megan Shuchman, executive director of 826Michigan, said the broader 826 national organization was founded in Valencia, California — at an address that started with 826, hence the name — by author Dave Eggers. The original mission, she said, was to create a youth writing and tutoring center. Each year, the Michigan branch executes two major print writing projects, one in Detroit and one in Washtenaw County.
“It’s usually a vetting process, sometimes a bunch of teachers will be asked who has interest and capacity for a large-scale project like this,” Shuchman said.
The group promotes writing, but has also noticed some students have a hard time with soft skills, such as working in small groups or collaborating. They aimed to make the projects ones that students would have to write their own stories, but work together to read, research and edit their work.
Anthony Goreta, a fifth-grade English language arts teacher at University Preparatory, a charter school with about 1,800 students, said the project aligned perfectly with what he was already teaching in class with the novel “Esperanza Rising.”
“I thought this was an excellent extension of bringing a semi-fictional story into the real world, and included themselves as part of this story as well,” Goreta said. “Because they were welcoming Esperanza to the city of Detroit, where they could visit things they were familiar with, and comfortable with.”
Goreta said each student wrote a story that was personal to them. The school held a reception when the Navigator published, so that each student could read their story out loud in front of their peers and their families.
“I can see the excitement in their eyes as they read their articles out loud,” he said.
Goreta said he often fields questions from his students about why they have to learn to write well. They are used to writing in text-message form, he said, with quick-hits or AI doing the work for them. And yet, every time the 826 staff would come into their classroom, Goreta said, the students would cheer.
“This 826 project and other writing we do in class is necessary for them to have jobs and to be organized into thinking,” he said. “And not just writing anything that comes to mind or shooting from the hip. You know, we have standards in the world. So everybody can be on the same communication level, and that way, we all can work on understanding each other better.”
Taylor said she even understood her peers better after reading what they had written in the Navigator, especially about Ford Field and the Detroit Lions.
“I read about the football stadium,” Taylor said. “I’m not really into football, but when I was reading, I was like, whoa, I might have to watch the game with my dad one time.”
When the Super Bowl rolled around, she said, she sat down to watch.
“It gave me a new experience,” she said.
A Kid’s Guide to Detroit
The Navigator is available online, and print copies are available for order at www.826michigan.org/detroit-navigator-2025.
jpignolet@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Detroit students create guide to the city, through the eyes of kids
Reporting by Jennifer Pignolet, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jennifer Pignolet, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
