Suzan goes to her art class every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She always looks forward to those days when she could do creative things all afternoon.

She loves making dishes and cups out of clay. Last month she learnt to put pottery into a hot oven and make it hard and strong.

After the pottery has cooled down from the oven, sometimes she paints it with all different colours. Bright colours are her favorite, although sometimes she likes to paint in "earth colors," like brown and dark green.

What Suzan likes best about art is the good feeling she gets when she has finished working on a piece of art. And then when she takes it home to show her parents, she feels so proud of what she has made.

On Wednesdays Suzan does something else that she really enjoys. On Wednesday afternoons she writes articles for the school newspaper.

When she first moved to her school, she wrote an article about how it feels to be a new student in a new school. Her second article in the newspaper was about a teacher at her school who had just finished writing a book.

Suzan asked the teacher what it feels like to be a published author. And then she shared what she found out with the rest of the school.

Another time she wrote an article about why she thought the school should have two short vacations a day rather than one long vacation. Lots of her friends thought that this would be a good idea too. Many teachers also agreed with Suzan’s suggestion.

Would you believe that the principal of the school asked everyone in the school to come to a school assembly and vote about Suzan’s suggestion? The principal at this school always felt that students should help decide how the school should be run.

During the vote, each person in the school had one vote. Each of the teachers had one vote. And each of the students had one vote. Together, the school decided that two short vacations would be better than one long vacation. And all these happened because Suzan wrote about the idea in the school newspaper.

On the day the newspaper comes out, the first thing Suzan does is to check where her article is in the newspaper. And each month, at the beginning of her article, are the words: By Suzanne Butare.

On the way home from school yesterday, Suzan thought about how much art and writing are the same. In art class she thinks of creative things to make, and then spends a lot of time making it look just right.

And when she writes articles for the school newspaper, she thinks of creative things to say, and then spends a lot of time making it sound just right.

And when she has finished writing a really good sentence, she feels almost as if she has made a beautiful piece of art. Suzan rushed home so that she could write something short before dinner.

She already had lots of ideas for next month’s newspaper. And she wanted to make sure that none of her creative ideas floated away before she wrote them down permanently on paper.

Ends