AUBURN — Park Avenue Elementary School held its annual Young Authors’ Day on April 30. This is the fourth year the event has been held at the school, after a more than 16-year run at the former Lake Street School.

The day is set aside to celebrate the reading and writing efforts of Park Avenue students and students are able to spend time with one of four Maine children’s authors in attendance.

This year’s featured authors were Angeli Perrow, Lynn Plourde, Cynthia Lord and Ruth Freeman Swain.

Students’ own writing was on display in the school’s media center as part of the Student Authors’ Gallery, giving students the chance to read each other’s work and give feedback to their fellow authors. “We feature a piece of published writing from every student in the school,” said YAD committee chair and first-grade teacher Cathy Dodge.

New to this year’s event was digital storytelling, where students created stories on laptops, adding their own sounds, photos and pictures taken from the internet to make a multimedia storytelling experience.

Also debuting at this year’s event was “Wordle,” a computer program that creates “word clouds” from words typed in by students, who could then customize the size, shape, color and font of their word cloud to create a type of text-based collage that could be printed out.

The Tie Guy, aka Mike Parker, a third-grade teacher from Lewiston, was also on hand to share his collection of neckties, hand-painted with characters from children’s books, and autographed by their authors. The collection includes ties autographed by Eric Carle, Steven Kellogg, Jan Brett and Beverly Cleary.

As in years past, a group of high school students from the Edward Little Drama Club ran a drama workshop for students, sharing acting warm-ups and theater games with the young actors. A group of parents also volunteered to help in craft sessions, read to students and assist wherever their help was needed. Auburn Mayor Dick Gleason was also on hand for the event. He received a tour of the school and listened in on workshops.