MAPLEWOOD – When Westfield High School students Stephen Chiger and Daniel Pereira started writing a book together after school, it was mainly just a fun way to pass the time. Now, almost 30 years later, that project has come to fruition.

Mr. Chiger and Mr. Pereira are the authors of “Gram and Gran Save the Summer,” a new work of middlegrade fiction designed to help teach children media literacy skills through puzzles. Already being lauded by experts, the book is an innovative approach to helping kids practice foundational skills they’ll need when they go online.

For Mr. Chiger and Mr. Pereira, though, it’s also the culmination of three decades of friendship, which began when they were freshmen. A few years ago, they both found themselves with a small amount of flexibility in their schedules: Mr. Pereira was in graduate school for social work, and Mr. Chiger was on parental leave, having just adopted his son, Cole. The time felt right to finish what they’d started.

“I wanted to write something for Cole and to make good on the work Dan and I had started so long ago,” Mr. Chiger said. “In many ways, writing this book felt like a way to connect my son and my younger self. Besides, Dan and I had a blast trying to crack each other up.”

The two collaborated by phone and online for months, shaping drafts and tweaking chapter concepts. By the time they were done, they liked what they’d written enough to see if any publisher did too. They signed a contract with TeacherGoals in 2023.

“When we first started writing, we didn’t know what we were going to do with the book. We were just having a good time,” Mr. Pereira said. But at some point we said, ‘hey, we’ve really got something there. We were lucky to find TeacherGoals. As educators themselves, they really got what we were going for and have given us great support.”

Readers have described the book as a fusion between the puzzles of “Encyclopedia Brown” and the whimsy of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” It comes at a perfect time for New Jersey, which passed S588 – a law requiring K-12 media literacy instruction – at the start of 2023.

Mr. Chiger and Mr. Pereira’s backgrounds set them up well to write the text. Mr. Chiger – who began his career in journalism at The Westfield Leader – formerly led the Hugh N. Boyd Journalism Diversity Workshop and the Garden State Scholastic Press Association. He was named the 2015 New Jersey Council of Teachers of English Teacher of the Year and is the co-author of “Love and Literacy,” a book on 5 to 12 English pedagogy.

Mr. Pereira received the 2008 Washington Post Agnes Meyer Teacher of the Year award and is a published author in the field of critical studies in children’s literature. He is pursuing back- to- back master’s degrees in English literature and social work.

The duo’s original text was a humor book, not a fiction teaching media literacy. But the pair said it was the start of a dream that they’d kept in the back of their heads for years.

“We recently went back and read some of what we wrote in high school,” Mr. Chiger said. “It was a field guide on how to be obnoxious, one of the few topics we felt like experts in back then. Hopefully by now we’ve expanded our expertise a tiny bit – and created something that sheds a bit more light than heat.”

The text has deep ties to the Westfield community. In addition to the TeacherGoals team, they enlisted Andrew Sobel, another close friend from Westfield High School, to help edit the text.

“Gram and Gran Save the Summer” is available wherever you buy your books. An educator guide is available for free at www.gramandgran.com.

“The best thing about writing a book with a friend is you know there’s at least one person that thinks your jokes are funny and your ideas make sense, but what we’re most interested in is seeing kids respond to Gram and Gran,” Mr. Pereira said. “We’re so excited to take our book out into the wild—to schools and libraries— to see what kinds of great discussions we can get going.”