Fifth graders at St. Ferdinand School got to see their words come to life on stage in December at St. Patrick High School’s “Super Awesome Short Play Extravaganza.”

The event included seven short plays written by the fifth graders as part of a partnership with St. Patrick’s theater program. St. Patrick theater director Jim Yost visited Kia Loster’s fifth grade language arts class once a week for six weeks to help students write their plays in small groups.

Then he took those plays to his honors theater class at St. Pat’s. The 15 students in the class spent about a month polishing the plays and figuring out how to stage them.

The end result was an hourlong workshop performance, complete with stage lighting, sound effects and music and plenty of theatrical smoke. It was performed three times, once during the school day for the St. Ferdinand students and twice in the evening so students could bring their families.

“It was awesome,” said St. Ferdinand fifth grader Liam Loster, who collaborated on “Saving Da World” with classmates Adrian Gaona and Ysabelle Rafal.

The play focuses on the efforts of two young people to stop an evil scientist from developing and releasing a virus that could kill millions of people.

Liam said he thought the high schoolers did a good job with it, but he was surprised by one thing: In the play he and his friends wrote, the scientist is caught after slipping on a pie. In the staged version, the actors used a cellophane-wrapped cookie instead.

“I thought it would be a real pie,” Liam said.

Ysabelle said that the play they wrote had a different ending originally. Even though that changed, she liked seeing the stage version.

“It was really good,” she said.

Cassy Mora, who wrote “School Detective,” about middle school students tracking down a mischievous mascot intent on disrupting a dance, with classmates Gavin Dougherty and Gabriella Moraitis, said her group mostly wrote by dividing up the characters and deciding what they would do in the scenario they created.

“It was weird to hear them call my character ‘Sasha,’” she said. “It was fun to work on this with my friends and get to think out of the box.”

Timmy Schayer, a sophomore at St. Pat’s, and Thomas McGee Lynch, a freshman, said that having a block schedule allowed the theater class longer stretches of time to work on the plays, but they only met every other day, which meant they had to be efficient.

“It was a lot of work,” Lynch said.

Both students said they enjoyed seeing what the elementary school playwrights came up with.

“It was definitely a different perspective,” Schayer said. “It was pretty cool.”

Yost, who brought the idea to St. Ferdinand Principal Erin Boyle Folino this fall, said the collaboration went well, and he’d like to do it again, either with St. Ferdinand or with other elementary schools.

Kia Loster, the St. Ferdinand teacher who worked on the project, said she would be happy to repeat the project as well.

She enjoyed seeing what her students came up with, since most had never written a play before. In addition to “Saving Da World” and “School Detective,” there was a horror story set at a slumber party, a play about mishaps at the gym and one about going to day care, and a police drama called “The Case of the Golden Cheese.”

Because St. Pat’s is an all-boys school, Yost brought in three women who are theater professionals to round out the cast, although several boys took on female roles as well.

Yost said it was interesting to take plays written by children, most of whom had never written a play before, and have them produced by teenagers, with a variety of experience levels, including some students who had never been on stage before.