CHRIS CODUTO/Arizona Daily Wildcat Stories that Soar! featured short plays written by local elementary school students. Students in Collaborative Play Development selected the stories to perform.

Students in the theatre arts program made stories written by local elementary school students come alive last night in a performance hosted by the College of Fine Arts and the School of Theatre Arts.

Stories that Soar! is a program created by students in the theatre arts class Collaborative Play Development.

Students in the class invite children from four local elementary schools to write stories and submit them to the "magic box" which makes the stories come alive on the stage, said instructor Bobbi McKean, assistant professor of theater arts.

Stories that Soar! was conceived by Sonia Teder-Moore, a fine arts graduate student. Teder-Moore, along with Sharon O'Brien and McKean, developed the program, said performer Sara Brancaccio.

The students from local Walter Douglass, Homer Davis, Sam Hughes and Lineweaver elementary schools wrote stories, and each student in an upper-division teaching art class choose their favorites and developed a way to make it come alive on stage, said Brancaccio, a senior majoring in English, creative writing and theatre education and outreach.

"The students write stories and the U of A students come up with ways to treat and perform them on stage," Brancaccio said.

In the three years of the project, McKean said, they have read about 2,500 stories, and the number of submissions grow each year.

Lineweaver Elementary School, 461 S. Bryant Ave., fourth-grader Hassan Farah wrote a story titled "My Dream" about his wishes for an America where everyone can be friends not based on skin color and religion, but interests and dreams.

"I was excited to see my story performed on stage," Farah said. "I have a dream for lots of things in America, and I don't want people to not be friends based on skin color."

This class teaches students how to develop plays for children and how to collaborate on a horizontal level, McKean said, rather than a top-down level like most production companies.