[KHTS] – When third-grade teacher Karen Jameson got an email from the publishers of AppleSeeds Magazine, informing her that they had accepted her article for publication, she said it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

Jameson is a 25-year veteran of theNewhall School District and has been teaching at Peachland Elementary School for 18 years.

She took a class about writing articles for children’s magazines in April 2013 and began researching magazines that would accept her submissions.

AppleSeeds

AppleSeeds is a social studies magazine for children ages 6- to 10-years old, published by Cobblestone Publishing, a branch of the Cricket Magazine Group.

Jameson saw that their theme for the March 2014 issue would be wheels, but she said that she wanted to come up with a unique take on the theme.

“I didn’t want to just pitch wheels on a car, or something that everyone would just think of,” she said.

Then she came across the idea of gyroscopes.

Gyroscopes have practical, everyday applications in devices like the iPhone, but they are also used in the Hubble Space Telescope, Jameson said.

She pitched her article idea to the magazine in June.

In November, Jameson received an email from Cobblestone, asking to buy her article “Gyrating Gyroscopes,” and inviting her class to participate in the March 2014 issue of the magazine.

Jameson’s third graders at Peachland Elementary answered the question “If there were no more wheels, what would you miss the most?” Their responses and pictures were published in “Appleseeds.”

The class celebrated the release of their March issue with a party on Friday, but the entire process took months.

“The whole thing took nine months from the day I sent my idea to the day I got my box of magazines,” Jameson said.

It was a great learning experience for the students, she said, because she was able to teach them about the parts of a magazine and what it takes to publish one.

And, it was an exciting experience for everyone involved.

“I was thrilled because that was my dream to be published,” Jameson said, “and to be able to share that with my students and be published in the same issue was really a dream come true… I’ve always wanted to be a writer since I was in elementary school, but I guess I didn’t feel brave enough to try when I was young.”

But now that she is published, it is something that Jameson plans to do again.

She has the manuscript for a children’s book in the works.

“During spring break, I’m going to be polishing that and send it off in hopes to find a publisher for it,” she said.

For more information about “Appleseeds” and the Cricket Magazine Group, click here.